Wine Without Grapes: The Fruit Taking Wine Beyond the Vineyard

By Eimear Corcoran

When we think about wine, we think about grapes. It’s almost automatic. Vineyard, grapes, fermentation, bottle. The word “wine” itself feels inseparable from the vine.

But grapes aren’t actually the only fruit capable of becoming wine.

Apples, pears, plums, cherries, berries, citrus and even tropical fruits can all be fermented into alcoholic drinks. The process isn’t entirely different from making grape wine either. Fruit is crushed or pressed, the juice is prepared, yeast gets to work, and fermentation turns sugar into alcohol.

The bigger question is why we’ve decided that wine has to come from grapes in the first place. And in some parts of the world, where growing grapes is difficult, the answer is becoming particularly interesting.

What If You Don’t Have the Grapes?

Ireland is a good example. It’s not exactly the first country you’d put on a list of wine-producing nations. Ireland is cold, wet and not particularly famous for long, hot summers, which makes ripening grapes consistently to the point where you can make quality wine a challenge.

Fruit wines made from Irish berries have been produced commercially, including by Wicklow Way Wines, which uses locally grown berries and follows the same basic fermentation, maturation and winemaking principles used for grape wine.

And apples make even more sense. Ireland has been growing apples for more than a century, with dessert, culinary and cider varieties all forming part of the country’s production.

So while Ireland might not be the first place that comes to mind when you hear “wine country,” the raw material is already there, you just have to stop looking for vines.

Not Every Fruit Makes Life Easy

Of course, making wine from fruit other than grapes isn’t as simple as throwing some fruit in a tank and waiting. Grapes are actually pretty convenient for winemaking. They naturally contain the sugar, acidity and juice that yeast needs to turn them into alcohol, while other fruit can be a little more complicated.

Plums, apricots and other stone fruits, for example, don’t necessarily have the same balance that a winemaker gets from grapes. Some need adjustments to sugar or acidity. Others bring their own challenges with bitterness, colour or flavour.

So there’s a lot of experimentation involved. And that’s part of the appeal.

What Happens When the Fruit Is Going to Waste?

One of the more interesting examples comes from Alejandro Fargosonini, who was featured on the Italian Wine Podcast in Episode 2427. Fargosonini is the co-founder and winemaker of Châteauneuf-du-Fargosonini, a small organic natural winery based in California’s Central Valley. He runs the winery with his partner and co-founder Andrea Spaziani, and their approach focuses heavily on using fruit that would otherwise be wasted at farm level. They have experimented with more than 120 different fruits grown in California’s Central Valley, alongside conventional grape varieties.

His approach involves using fruit that might otherwise be rejected or wasted, including plums, pluots, apricots, nectarines, and other stone fruit.

The idea is pretty straightforward: if the fruit is perfectly usable but isn’t going to make it onto a supermarket shelf, why throw it away? Ferment it instead. It’s a different way of thinking about wine production. Rather than starting with a vineyard and asking what you can make from the grapes, you start with the fruit that’s available and work backwards. And suddenly, fruit that might have had only a short shelf life can become something that lasts much longer.

That’s not just interesting from a winemaking point of view. It’s part of the wider movement towards food upcycling, where food that would otherwise be discarded is turned into a new product with added value. Upcycling is increasingly being discussed as part of the circular economy, which aims to move away from the traditional “take, make, waste” model and keep resources in use for longer. In the case of fruit wine, instead of treating unwanted fruit as waste, it becomes the starting point for something new.

Maybe Wine Doesn’t Always Need a Vineyard

The traditional wine world is built around the vineyard. The grape variety, the soil, the climate, the vineyard site. All of these things matter. But not every place has the climate for grapes.

Or at least, not every place has the climate for the kind of grapes we’re used to talking about.

Ireland is one example, but the same basic idea applies elsewhere. If a region has apples, berries, cherries, plums or other fruit growing successfully, there’s an opportunity to ferment them. That doesn’t mean every fruit wine is going to replace Chardonnay. Part of the fun is that these drinks can be something completely different.

There is also a growing market for fruit wine. Future Market Insights estimates that the global fruit wine market was valued at US 1.3.03 billion by 2036. The report defines fruit wine as alcoholic wine made from non-grape fruits, including berries, apples, stone fruits and tropical fruits, and excludes grape wine, fruit-flavoured grape wine, fruit cider and non-alcoholic fruit beverages. It identifies consumer interest in flavoured and lower-alcohol wine alternatives, the demand for artisanal and small-batch production, and the expansion of online and direct-to-consumer distribution as factors supporting market growth.

What Happens as Climate Changes?

There’s another reason this conversation is worth having.

Growing grapes is already becoming more complicated in some traditional wine regions as temperatures rise and weather patterns become less predictable. At the same time, places that historically struggled to ripen grapes are starting to experiment with growing them.

Ireland is actually an interesting case here. There is now a small but growing interest in Irish vineyards, although the climate still makes grape production challenging.

So perhaps the future isn’t simply about moving vineyards further north, maybe it’s also about being a little more creative about what we ferment, because if a region has fruit, it has another potential raw material for making something interesting.

The Vineyard Isn’t the Only Place Wine Begins

A bottle doesn’t necessarily have to begin with a vineyard. It could start with an apple orchard, a plum harvest, a field of blackberries or a pile of fruit that wasn’t quite pretty enough for the supermarket. For producers working in places where grapes are difficult to grow, that opens up a completely different conversation. So maybe the question isn’t always where the next great vineyard will be, maybe sometimes it’s what’s already growing!

Tune in to the Italian Wine Podcast for all the latest Italian wine news with a truly global perspective at: www.italianwinepodcast.com.