🥃 Grape products

Grape products are the various foods and drinks made from grapes other than wine, such as brandy, vinegar and sweets. Grapes are used for much more than wine. The same berries give dozens of products, from juice and sweets to spirits and oil. Many of them began as a way to waste nothing after the harvest. ³

The simplest are grape juice and grape must, fresh juice before fermentation. Boiled-down must becomes grape syrup, the base of churchkhela, pelamushi and Greek moustalevria. Dried berries become raisins. The sour juice of unripe grapes is verjuice, and soured wine turns into wine vinegar and balsamic vinegar. ¹³

Pressing leaves pomace: skins, seeds and stems. It is distilled into pomace brandy, and the seeds are pressed for grape seed oil. Wine itself is distilled into brandy, and grape spirit is the base of grape rakia, arak, rakı and ouzo. ¹²

Even the leftovers of fermentation are useful. Wine lees from the bottom of the tank and wine tartar, the crystals on barrel walls, give tartaric acid and cream of tartar, which goes into baking powder. ⁴

Dried grapes are a small but concentrated trade: world production was about 1.5 million tonnes in 2014, dominated by Turkey and the USA, with Turkey the leading raisin exporter. Table grapes were far larger, about 27 million tonnes, and Peru and South Africa are notable players in their trade. Overall, about 50 % of the 2014 harvest went mainly to wine and about 46 % was sold as grapes without pressing.