Well run bars and kitchens around the world all share at least one attribute; they have good waste management; Do not throw away food. The parts you don’t use for your dish, you turn into something else that you can sell.
It’s the same way for a farmer and winemaker. Where wine (and it’s distillate Brandy) is fermented fruit juice, you are left with loads of waste when pressing your fruit. All the stems, stones, skins and fruit pomace (the “meat”) are leftovers, that you do not need in further steps in wine producing.
The farmer normally sells his wine, or if rich enough to have a distilling apparatus, the distillate. So, getting high on your own supply means cutting into profits. Normally not a thing people want to do, as money is nice.
However, the leftovers of wine production can also ferment into a porridge of putrid horribleness, that you can distill into what we commonly call Pomace Brandy. Most wine prod ucing areas have a tradition for this, and they all call it by different names. The best known version of this is the Italian Grappa, but we do have other kinds, including;
The only kind of Pomace Brandy known in Norway is grappa, so much so that Grappa as a term is better known than the term Pomace Brandy.
One reason for this is that the Italians are really good at marketing, and know how to wrap a turd in silk robes and call it a Robust Beauty. Therefore, they managed to turn a rustic waste product of Wine into something they could sell to the international market.
The moment money became a thing, newer, better things were tried, and Italy has had a Monovitigno tradition going for their grappas for a few years now. Monovitigno is a fancy italian term for “one type of grape”, and tells you what you need to know. Most Pomace Brandies are a mash of all kinds of grapes, and mixed together without much thought or purpose, though with the monovitigno tradition, grappa of just one kind of grape can be had and tried. Depending on the grape variety, this can create a hugely different product.