Many winemakers are experimenting with making wine out of fruits and berries other than grapes. Home vintners have long experimented with various fruits with traditional local fruits.

Wine has been celebrated in song throughout the millenia. Even non-grape wines have been praised. Cherry wine especially has evoked songs of love and loss and is featured as the title of Carol Schmidt's mystery Sweet Cherry Wine. Just as grape varietals have their own character, fruit wines can be exotic, flavorful, and exciting to drink. Blackberries, elderberries, loganberries, blackcurrants, blueberries, cranberries, raspberries, and strawberries have all been used successfully to make red red.

Those berries with a deeper, less sweet taste can create red wines satisfying to traditional wine drinkers. Blackberry wine can taste similar to a red Bordeaux if properly aged. Elderberries grown outside the coastal areas of North America make a nice aromatic red wine. Dried elderberries or elderberry juice are generally available from winemaking stores. Elderberries also make an excellent addition to red wines make from grapes as that supply tannin that many concentrates lack.

Delicious desert wines can be made from loganberries and blackcurrants. Blackcurrant wines has an aroma similar to Cabernet Sauvignon. Cranberries, raspberries, and strawberries all have delicate flavors that can make nice dessert wines. The key is not to over sweeten and serve ice cold. It really is impossible to make a dry strawberry wine.

Many beginning home winemakers will begin with fruit readily available in their local areas. Becareful, not all fruit makes good wine. Other fruits, such as apricots, are better used to create liqueurs. Plums tend to take on an odd, tangy taste during fermentation when used in wine making. Plums do make decent sherries and ports. Plums ferment well creating high-alcohol yeast strains that make fortified wines.

With a little creativity good wines can be made from fruits other than grapes.