best home winemaking book for fruit and veg focus

Snpm,

The book "Making Wild Wines & Meads" by Pattie Vargas and Rich Gulling has a wealth of recipes for the winemaker who wants to focus on fruits, vegetables, herbs, and even nuts. The book is essentially a recipe book, without a whole lot of time spent on winemaking basics. All of their recipes are for 1 gallon volumes, which I find to be more fiddly than is worthwhile. But their recipes can be adapted to 3, 5, 6 gallon or greater volumes with ease. Aside from the recipes, of which there are a great number, the book doesn't have much to offer. They don't use many different yeasts, and don't explain why they use any particular yeast in any particular recipe. They do recommend sulfites, which is a very good thing for the beginning winemaker.

Good luck with your winemaking!

Cheers, Ken

Well, there's Jack Keller's homemade wine site, if you just want to look on the web. However, I started with the book "the Joy of Home Winemaking" by Terry Garey. It is a basic home winemaking book which looks at starting from the beginning with recipes for the beginner, intermediate, and advanced winemaker. I found it useful, because it was very basic and it did not get into the intricate chemistry of making wine. This is my 5th year of making wine, and I usually use Jack's site in combination with Garey's book, but that is just me. Darlene

I can tell you one to be careful with; the Penn State book should be great but I made the mistake of following their guide to making strawberry wine. Whoever proof read the book should have had to drink that first attempt.

They told you to add x tablespoons of acid when in actuality it should have been teaspoons. I questioned it but did it anyway (to prove how gullible I can truly be). What started out as 5 gallon ended up being

17 gallons by the time I got the acid balanced. The good news is that every time I do something stupid like that I work harder to recover from the error and that wine usually turns out to be the best liked of that year.

All I'm saying is if you get that book and an addition seems questionable, add the qty requested in small increments and measure and taste as you go... In all honesty I bought if for fruit winemaking and do like the format, it's a good book.

Joe

I'll second that recommendation. It's a great way to start and it's got lots of recipes.

Erroll

and il third it! as recommended by jack keller terry gareys book and jacks site pretty much cover me as well

fourth it!

And this group of course.

I recommend those, too, esp. Jack's site. My one argument with both of them is their fondness for putting boiling water on fresh fruit. My personal opinion is that it changes the taste of the fruit, and is unnecessary if you use sulfite. There's been much discussion about that issue on this site, so it's a question of taste.

Other than that, these are great resources.

Kate

Probably the best book would be the one that Jack Keller has never written but might some day. He as done more serious experimenting with fruit winemaking than anyone I am aware of. He just has to write it.

If you are interested in real books (I assume you are) then I recommend C.J.J. Berry's books. They are a bit dated but then winemaking is as well. His First Steps in Winemaking is a good introduction and "130 New Winemaking Recipes" is a real jewel. Not only does it have many excellent recipes, but they are interspersed with excellent winemaking cartoons. You don't see many winemaking cartoons. You can often find these used.

Ray