"Doug Freyburger" > wrote in message
om...

> Not quite rice wine, not quite rice beer, but in that
> general range. Wines are brewed from fruit and sake
> is made from rice so it isn't quite a wine.

It's actually not so much the original materials used -
wine isn't "brewed" at all. Sake is, sort of (at least,
one of the first steps is steaming the rice), and then
the fermenation is via a mold, not a yeast. And sake
goes through a single fermentation, unlike wine which
generally has two fermentation steps. So it's more
like beer in the overall process, and more like wine
in terms of the alcohol content (in the 10-20% range,
often right around 16%, which is a bit high even for
wine unless it's "fortified").

Bob M.