Wine
The juice of the grape is just one of the
naturally sweet liquids with which our
ancestors learned to make alcoholic drinks.
Perhaps just as ancient as grape wine is
koumiss, the fermented mare’s milk of the
central Asian nomads. One Greek word for
wine, methu, came from the Indo-European
word for fermented honey water, whose name
in English is mead. The Romans fermented
dates and figs. And before they tasted wine,
the inhabitants of northern Europe drank apple
juice fermented into cider.
But the grape turned out to be uniquely
suited to the development of a diverse family
of alcoholic drinks. The grapevine is a highly
productive plant that can adapt to a wide
range of soils and climates. Its fruits retain
large amounts of an unusual acid, tartaric
acid, which few microbes can metabolize, and
which favors the growth of yeasts. The grapes