[zdragnar]

For fruit wines: you can ferment any fruit with enough sugar. They tend to be made sweet, as many fruits can have bitter or unpleasant flavors that come out when dry, such as strawberry. That said, one of my favorites was a dry raspberry that my dad made.

The Chinese stories could be referring to rice wine, a spirit similar to sake. If the stories refer to regions along the Silk road though, they could easily also be referring to grape wine.

[PaulHoule]

The Chinese alcoholic drink that I think about today is

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baijiu

which might have exited in a prototypical form at that time.

[zdragnar]

That is a distilled spirit.

Mijiu:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mijiu

is what would be a rice wine. Wikipedia listed it going back as far as 1000 BCE.

It is considered more of a wine than an ale presumably due to the alcohol content, the type of yeast used and how it is usually consumed, despite being a grain beverage (somewhat like barleywine only more so).

[PaulHoule]

Kinda like Japanese Sake?