Product Description

Port and sharries, whites, reds, roses and melomels -- make your own wine without owning a vineyard!

If you can follow a simple recipe, you can create delectabletable wines in your own home. It's fun, it's easy-and the resultswill delightfully complement your favorite meals and provide unparalleledpleasure by the glass when friends come calling. You don't have tore-create Bordeaux in your basement to be a successful home vintner-you can make raisin wine and drink it like sherry, or use it to accent yourChinese cooking. Raspberry or apricot wine lend themselves to deliciousdesserts. And if you are interested in more exotic concoctions,rhubarb champagne is the ultimate treat.

The Joy of Home Winemaking is your comprehensive guide to:

• the most up-to-date techniques and equipment
• readily available and affordable ingredients and materials
• aging, bottling, racking, blending, and experimenting
• dozens of original recipes for great-tasting fruit wines,
• spice wines, herb wines, sparkling wines, sherries, liqueurs
• even homemade soda pop!
• a sparkling brief history of winemaking
• helpful illustrations and glossary
• an extensive mail-order resource section

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59236 in Books
• Published on: 1996-06-01
• Released on: 1996-06-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Customer Reviews

Poor writing, poor focus
I read the reviews on Amazon prior to buying this book but mainly I bought because it seemed to be modeled after it's home brewing counter part, (The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing). I've been brewing beer for sometime and have spoken with several wine makers aboout making a transition to wine.

The first thing I noticed when I started reading this book is that it's poorly written. I'll provide some examples. There is a chapter in the beginning for making your first gallon of wine. The author starts with a list of equipment and then goes into instruction. She forgets to mention that you need 2 jugs, she gives you easy to follow steps but never explains why you need to do it. One part she tangents off of her destilled instruction to give you detailed syphoning (racking) instructions. Even the technique she gives you is horrible. She tells you to sanitize your mouth with alcohol and suck the wine to then of the tube then quickly stick in the jug. Gimme a break! If she wanted to offer a good technique there are plenty of better ones like an auto-syphon for $10 or to cap the jug and blow through a seperate hose.

Her poor writing style continues where she speaks goes off on other tangents about her husband, then suddenly starts using his name but never links the two things.

In later chapters she refers back to things she justified in the beginning like using PA (potential alcohol) instead of SG (specific gravity) readings. If you actually go back she doesn't ever offer a good explanation as to why.

Some of her instructions are just dumb. As I stated she tells you not to use gravity reading on a hydrometer because you don't need it. She says to use PA. The she gives you methods for adjusting your reading for temperature by using SG. Huh!? Her rationale is that the only way to adjust the reading is by using SG then re-converting. This is idiotic. Both scales are completely linear. Even the adjustments she gives you are wrong. She says add .9 instead of .009. This is fine for us experienced brewers and wine makers but this is in the beginners chapter of her book. Someone could be very confused by this.

Lastly the book seems to completely wrip off the title, format, etc... of Charlie Papazian's book but is nothing like it. It leaves critical steps out, never gets passed being a beginners book, barely touches on grape wine making and is generally a poor instructional guide to wine making.

Charlie has a motto in his book, "relax, have a homebrew". She tries to offer a couple of her own but they're obviously just poor ripoffs from his.

Her index is missing several terms she uses frequently such as "PA".

In summary you can learn everything this book has to offer by reading online "how to" articles. I suggest then going to some wine making forums and meeting people. Either that or find a better book.

Great for the Novice Winemaker!
As a novice winemaker, I was looking for something to help guide me in making wine from something other than the premade kit. There are lots of great ideas and seem to be easy to follow.

Shipping was quick. This was a great purchase!

Average level, fun for trying your own winemaking
I have to admit that I stood at the book store for a long time looking over a small selection of books for winemaking. If you are looking for a book that deals just with grape wines, put this back on the shelf. But for me I fell in love. I flip through the start and then check out the back index, references, and everything else in the appendix. It has the conversions (metric, and general volumes which makes it easy to know how many cups are in a pound) The index has by subject, recipe, and ingredients.
The recipes are fun which makes it all the more exciting to finally find out how your wine will taste after those 6 months. I started to read this book a couple days ago and it is already bookmarked by information and recipes I want to try.
The chapter with info on the hydrometer is so much less complex than other papers I have read.
You can't have just one winemaking book, that would be unwise. Add this one to your collection.