Rice wine

Rice wine is an alcoholic beverage made from rice. Unlike European wine, which is made by fermentation of naturally occurring sugars in sweet grapes and other fruit, rice wine is made from the fermentation of rice starch that has been converted to sugars. The process is somewhat similar to the mashing process used in beer and whiskey production but differs in the source of the enzymes that convert starch to sugars. In rice and other cereal wines, microbes are the source of the enzymes whereas beer, ale and whiskey production utilizes the enzymes naturally occurring in sprouted cereal grains. Strictly speaking wine is the product of fermenting grape juice. Alcoholic beverages produced by fermenting the starch found in cereal grains like rice, are thus not technically wine as such. As they utilize grains, socalled starch or cereal wines such as Japanese Sake or Chinese Huangjiu could be considered more akin to beer than wine, yet the finished alcoholic beverage is so disparate from beer that this description is very misleading. The organoleptic qualities of a fermented cereal beverage such as rice wine are much more like grape wine and this is often the context used for its description. Rice wine typically has a higher alcohol content, 18%