Bioactive Compounds in Fruit Wines: A Narrative Review

Fruit wines produced from non-grape fruits are gaining increasing attention as value-added fermented beverages due to their diverse chemical composition and content of bioactive compounds. This narrative review provides a comparative overview of fruit wines obtained from berries, drupes, pome fruits, citrus fruits, and tropical fruits, with particular emphasis on their physicochemical characteristics, phenolic composition, antioxidant properties, and technological aspects of production. Rather than considering fruit wines as a single category, the available evidence is examined across different fruit groups to identify characteristic patterns in the occurrence and relative abundance of bioactive compounds and their associated antioxidant activity. Berry wines are generally distinguished by their high phenolic and anthocyanin contents, whereas wines produced from other fruit categories exhibit distinct profiles of phenolic acids, flavonoids, and other bioactive constituents. Differences in raw materials and technological conditions, including fermentation and processing strategies, contribute substantially to the variability observed in the composition and functional properties of the resulting wines. The review also considers fruit-wine pomace as a potentially valuable source of residual bioactive compounds, highlighting opportunities for its valorization within sustainable and circular production systems. However, differences in analytical methods, reporting units, sample matrices, and experimental conditions currently limit direct quantitative comparisons among studies. Overall, this review integrates compositional, technological, and antioxidant-activity data across major fruit categories, identifies current knowledge gaps, and highlights opportunities for improving fruit-wine production, analytical characterization, and the sustainable utilization of fruit-processing by-products.