101 Recipes for Making Wild Wines at Home: A Step-by-Step Guide to Using Herbs, Fruits, and Flowers

It was as advertised. I was hoping to see some citrus recipes but I have discovered that they are not good for wine making.It is a mystery to me why people would make wine from vegetables but to each his own.

This is an excellent book for the novice winemaker who is interested in practicing making small amounts of wine and not having to use grapes. There some recipies that are incomplete so you will need to read them through completely before starting. Look at a similar fruit or vegetable recipie to help guide you along. Overall, I've been using this book for the past two years and I have made several good wines (some flopped but not because of the book)! Good luck and salute!

While the basic layout is OK and the writing style breezy and easy to read, closer inspection shows some major holes. Example: A one point he warns against adding sulfites as they may impart an unpleasant flavor. When introducing some intermediate equipment he introduces the “Campden tablets,” but doesn’t really say what they do or how they work [they are compressed pieces of sodium metabiSULFITE], or why you might want to use them in one recipe but not another. The index only lists one page entry for “Campden tablets” and there is no mention of them on that page, but without counting them specifically it appears that more than half the recipes call for using them. So their use and function is a mystery that shows up more than half the time. In the Glossary of Terms, it says they are to “sterilize wine,” but that is in direct contradiction to wine being a living things with yeast, and different recipes call for them to be used at different times, soooooo….?On the issue of the index, to give another example: Blackberry wine. None of the three pages given in the index have anything to do with blackberry wine recipes. The two pages that DO have blackberry wine recipes are not in the index, they are found by looking in the index for “other fruit wines… berry wines” and then leafing forward until you find them. I do not know if I found all of them. One calls for Campden tablets, the other doesn’t. Why? Meanwhile, something relatively innocuous like “tannin” has 23 entries in the index.On the subject of “how” there are some totally mysteries. On the one hand he says you want to avoid having a large air-gap above the wine (ok, sort of makes sense) but then he doesn’t say how much you should expect to lose each time you rack it to leave the lees behind, how to minimize that loss, what possible uses there are for it (the stuff left behind, that is), how you make up the difference to keep the gallon carboy full, how you can regularly test the specific gravity of it without contaminating it or losing too much of it. I mean, if he says to ferment until SG of X, or Y weeks, how often should you check, and is the time or the SG more important? If it says to rack once a month until clear, how much of the bottom lees do I leave behind or suck up the siphon each racking? The bottom 1.5” is cloudy, but only the bottom 1/8” is sludge? Do I care about the “cloudy” part or not?So in a way it leaves me with more questions than I started with. And this is a highly regarded “beginners” book? I’d hate to see a bad one.

Very good recipe I like it.

This book is the right book for somebody... just not me. With recipes that include ingredients like campden tablets, pectic enzyme, packaged wine yeast, and "acid blend," the wines herein shouldn't rightly even be termed artisanal, let alone wild. To quote David Asher, the Black Sheep cheesemaker, "With their synthetic rennets manufactured in bioreactors in Columbia, and bacterial cultures raised in laboratories in Denmark, how can artisanal cheeses truly be considered handmade and local?" Ditto for wines. There's a real loss of quality taking place when we use weak yeast in a sterile environment in an attempt to exert control. It's not clear from the item description that commercial methods are what's used, and it sure was disappointing that there's no sign of open-fermentation. I'll keep it around for inspirations and flavor ratios, anyhow.This book will do a fine job of teaching you how to make home-scale industrial wines using creative ingredients. Just don't expect anything too wild.

I purchased this book because the title claimed it was about "Making Wild Wines". I wanted a book about using wild yeast strains in home wine making. This book is NOT about that. It is a reasonable book with good instructions for the beginner on making grape and fruit/vegetable wines. It is not about "wild" anything.

This booked seemed very promising due to the wild wine recipes that it contained but when you look a little closer (and more thoroughly than the editor did) you notice that a large amount of the recipes are wrong, don't include where to actually add ingredients that are listed to be needed in the ingredient list, and there is little to no explanation on how to actually make wine. For a long time winemaker this may be a good source to find recipe ideas but I would worry about actually making the specific recipe due to the inconsistency of them. It does a good job at explaining the very very basics...well almost. Look up "Camden tablet" in the index. You would assume since this is an ingredient needed in many a wine recipe including most of the ones in the book, it would take you to a page explaining what a "Camden tablet" is. Instead "Camden Tablet p.137" is the only thing listed which turns out to be a recipe for wine which includes a Camden tablet like the other 100 recipes in the book....nothing else. In another recipe Lemon juice/rind is listed in needed ingredients but nowhere in the recipe does it say where or when to add it. As someone who brews beer, I know things are done at specific times for specific reasons. Little things can alter a recipe drastically. I believe that the author has some really good ideas but his editor needs to pay a little bit better attention to the important things!

didn't cover all possible ingredients but what is there is fine