★★★★★
Pekmezi is made by boiling down slowly for hours the first juice you get after crushing the grapes (the very first step for producing wine before any kind of fermentation) until this juice becomes a mild-thick black-brown sweet syrup. Actually in Greece we can do it in our own kitchen provided we find tons of fresh crushed grape juice. It is a difficult home procedure as we need "gallons" of this fresh juice to produce a bottle of pekmezi. There are a lot of wine producing countries in the world but I don't know if any others than the two above have also this product -well, lazy housewives ? :-)
Even wikipedia doesn't mention pekmezi in its "grapes" page as a grapes product (although there is a petimezi page, mentioned above)
If you just consider the raw material grapes- the grape molasses is far better than any other molasses. There are a lot of "grape" diets but non "sugar cane" ones, and there are a lot of health claims for grapes.
Anyway the grape molasses is so rich in iron too, that you can taste it. One spoon per day is the best home remedy for iron deficiency anemia. In Greece this was a must have remedy for young girls with heavy menstruation, actually not a remedy in a sense of healing the heavy menstruation, but in a sense of rebuilding the body the blood and the stamina. Pregnant women used to take it also. It was a material difficult to produce and every home had bottle as a medicine in its kitchen. I said was because the big pharma came and now the population has been brainwashed to take iron pills for anemia and millions of synthetic vitamins. Also as it is a have it all super food- when a small child was very ill and refused to eat we gave him a spoon of petimezi and we were sure that its body had all the necessary nutrients to combat illness and we didn't mind that the child refused to eat. I remember when I was 7 with chicken pox and 40Celsius for a week and I was saying "I'm dying" my mother gave me pekmezi and water as my sole food. I do not know in other countries what kind of food they feed (before the mass products appear) the very ill children when they refuse to eat but I suppose those exact foods would be the richest in nutrients foods available locally. Check on them in your country!
