Home Winemaking Step-by-Step: A Guide to Fermenting Wine Grapes

by Jon Iverson

Home brewing has come a long way from the days when charming elderly ladies would concoct lethal or explosive beverages from hedgerow or garden ingredients. These days, thousands of amateur wine and beer makers are engaged in this enjoyable and cost saving hobby, producing excellent results from a variety of fruits and other plant sources. This book is a round-the-year guide to wine and beer making, covering dry and sweet wines, beers, lagers, liqueurs, and fortified wines. In the introduction, the author explains the basic principles of the art and advises on health and safety and the choice, use, and care of equipment.

The main body of the text, illustrated with line drawings, is a season-by-season guide to ingredients and recipes for making wines and beers to suit all tastes.

There is a comprehensive index and appendices on measuring acid content, blending liqueurs, gravity readings, sugar content and potential alcohol, poisonous or unsuitable plants and a checklist of the common and scientific names of plants to be avoided.

232 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1997

Reviews

[Matthewphoenix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great, compact book that covers all of the basics for making reds and whites. It turns out wine making is very complicated, and forums/internet can become misleading and even contradictory at times. This book is cheap and typically is straight forward. Sometimes I did have to look up things online for a second opinion, but overall he gives a good picture of what to do.

[Reza]

Good reference; have been referring to it as I need to.

[Andrew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I got this book to learn what it takes to do home-winemaking. I learned that I'm likely not going to try - but if I were, I'd use this book. You need LOTS of stuff. Also, it takes 100 lbs of grapes to make 5 gallons of wine. That's a lot of grapes.

I'll stick with juice if we ever grow backyard grapes.

Oh, and I didn't READ this book as much as read the intros and figure out what was in the chapters. Maybe my review would be different if I had actually read it.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read better books on winemaking than this one.

[Stuart Lutzenhiser · Rating 3 out of 5]

A dense overview of how to make Red and White wines at home. Lots of stuff about sulfites and chemicals. I hope making wine isn't as hard as this book makes it out to be. Good book, though.