Sonoma Wines

Wine is an alcoholic drink typically made of fermented grape juice. Wines can also be made from other fruits and substances such as rice wine, barley wine, apple wine, berry wine, and ginger wine, but the Wine.im site primarily deals with wine made from grapes, which is what the general public generally thinks of as 'wine'.

The word "wine" derives from the Proto-Germanic "winam" which is an early borrowing from the Latin word vinum, "wine" or "(grape) vine".

Wine is produced by fermenting crushed grapes using various types of yeast. Yeast consumes the sugars found in the grapes and converts them into alcohol. Their natural chemical balance enables grapes to ferment without adding sugars, acids, or enzymes. Different varieties of grapes and strains of yeasts are used depending on the type of wine being produced.

Wine has a rich history dating back to approximately 6,000 BC and archaeological evidence suggests that the earliest production of wine, made by fermenting grapes, took place in sites now within the borders of Georgia and Iran. Iran had a thriving wine industry that has since disappeared since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

The oldest known evidence of wine production in Europe is dated to approximately 4,500 BC when it began appearing in what is now Bulgaria and Greece. Wine has played an important role in religion throughout history with consumption traced back thousands of years in ancient China and Egypt. It is used today in Christian and Jewish ceremonies and its consumption was common in ancient Greece, Thrace and Rome. The Greek god Dionysos and the Roman equivalent Bacchus represented wine.