ABSTRACT
Fermented beverages and alcoholic drinks are culturally and socially accepted products for consumption, drinking, entertainment, customary practices, and religious purposes. Making and drinking of alcoholic beverages are widespread interest enhancing the nutritional signi™cance as well as imparting pleasure of drinking (Darby 1979). Wine was believed to be made in the Caucasus and Mesopotamia as early as 6000 BC, and the colonization by the Romans spread wine making all around the Mediterranean and eventually came to Northern India and China in 100 BC (Robinson 1994, Pretorius 2000). Consumption of alcoholic drinks in India has been mentioned in the Ramayana during 300-75 BC (Prakash 1961). Platt (1964) referred to a traditional fermented beverage as the primary example of “biological ennoblement” due to the bioenrichment with essential nutrients through fermentation. Alcoholic beverages represent a vast diversity of products ranging from ethnic, fermented beverages, alcoholic drinks, and distilled alcoholic products to wine and beer (Stewart 1987). Ethnic, alcoholic beverages have a strong ritualistic importance among the ethnic people of Asia and Africa where social activities require the provision and consumption of appreciable quantities of alcohol. Ethnic alcoholic brewing is a home-based industry mostly practiced by rural women of Asia and Africa using their native skills of alcohol fermentation. Similarly, wine has a deep-rooted cultural history for the European as well as Mediterranean ethnic people.
