Customer Reviews

The Home Winemaker's Companion: Secrets, Recipes, and Know-How for Making 115 Great-Tasting Wines

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

We are the owners of Maltose Express, the largest winemaking and homebrew store in Connecticut. Whenever a winemaker is looking for a winemaking book, whether the customer is a novice or an experienced winemaker, this book is the one we sell them. It is written by a home-winemaker who knows his craft; after all, he has been making award-winning wine for over 40 years. Not only is Mr. Spaziani a past president ot the American Wine Society and teaches college classes on winemaking and appreciation, but he is also ranked as one of the top ten national home wine-makers ever! This is one author of a winemaking book that doesn't just sit in front of a computer and write. He makes alot of wine and has the purple hands in September and October to prove it! Follow his advice, methods and use his expertise to make your own luscious and award winning wines. Buy this book, your next wine might be a gold medal winner!

Gene Spaziani and Ed Halloran have written a book that needed to be written. The first three chapters are the obligatory "how to make wine" chapters ("Getting Started," "Essential How-Tos" and "Wine from Kits"). These have been done better by others, but the book would be incomplete without them.

The meat of this book begins with chapter 4, "Wine from Concentrates." And what a chapter it is, covering 13 specific white wine concentrates (Chenin Blanc to Vino Blanc) and 13 specific red wine concentrates (Barbera to Zinfandel), with recipes and step-by-step instructions for each (all suspiciously similar, but if the shoe fits....).

Chapter 5 is "Wine from Juices," and it does a superb job with 15 white grape juices (Chardonnay to Vidal Blanc), 15 red grape juices (Barbera to Zinfandel again, but many in between are different) and one blush.

Chapter 6, "White Wine from Grapes," covers 20 great grapes, from Aurora French-American Hybrid to Vidal Blanc French-American Hybrid, with some real classics in between. Chapter 7 is predictably "Red Wine from Grapes," covering another 20 grapes from Alicante-Bouschet to--again--Zinfandel, but the in-betweens are both classic and unusual.

Chapter 8, "Wine from Fruit," offers up 14 classic non-grape wines--from Apple to Strawberry. I found some of the ingredients thought-provoking(Epsom salts, for example, in fresh-crushed apple juice), but I found their choices of yeast less than inspiring (their heavy reliance on sweet mead yeast was a bit unimaginative, in my opinion).

Chapter 9, "Sparkling and Fortified Wines," offers a very good primer on these subjects, with more emphasis on the latter than the former. Chapter 10 is "Trouble-Shooting," but this, like the first three chapters, has been done better by others.

Criticisms aside, this book is a valuable adjunct to any winemaker's library. Where else can you find recipes for Cayuga French-American Hybrid, Lemberger red or Morio Muskat, all in the same volume? You can bet my copy is already well-thumbed....

I am a newer wine maker and as such, I found this book to be just what I needed to help get the job done! Other books I own were much more difficult to follow or they went off on some tangent or were incomplete. The Home Winemaker's Companion achieves exactly what is needed to help anyone make good drinkable wine and have fun. Thank You!

I have been making wine for over 20 years, and can attest that the book will provide all of the information needed to make the adventure of winemaking a success.The chapter on "Essential How-Tos" and "Troubleshooting" will be enormously helpful to any serious homewinemaker. A great addition to any library.

This book could be reduced to one half or one third pages. The '115 great tasting' wines part of this book is essentially a repetition of the same basic formula over and over with only a few wines with some variation from one to the next. Basic operations are described, but I was hoping for a bit more of fine pointers. It is a good starter basic book. But save a few trees and streamline at the risk of looking like there is no content, or add some.

I have recently purchased this wine making book. It contains many receipies for many diferent types and styles of wines. I have found it to be very helpful in my efforts to making good sound wines.

The book is easy to read, in a user-friendly format. The book is written more as a recipe book than the chemical- experiment type of winemaking books. The fear of making wine is addressed early on in the book, and the short recipes are very interesting. For example, there are "recipes" (rather than formulas) for tomato and other fruit wines. And, as the author mentions, if you try to make beer you could make yourself or someone else ill, but if you try your hand at making wine and you fail, you have a designer vinegar.

This is a book from my Christmas List and is great if you want recipes on how to convert all your grapes in to wine. However, if you are looking for a book that provides you with technical information about wine making, and a substantial number of country wines, you may need to look elsewhere. It was hard to review because although it has a great selection of grape recipes, it lacks the detail I was looking for on how to make wine, and develop wine recipes from scratch, unless I missed it.

As a newcomer to home winemaking I found this book to be well organized, well writen and informative. It has all the details necessary to do the job properly without being overly technical. The author has a list of all the necessary equipment and a list of things that are "nice to have." I did some research on the author and he is recognized as one of the premier wine experts in the country.

a very good book to start with. has many traditional wines. all in different catagories according to the grape. i used the peach and white grape recipe for my first try. everyone absolutley loves it.