Customer Reviews

Home Winemaking: Step-By-Step

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you've never before made wine from grapes but want to try it, or if you've been making it for years but simply want to improve your skills and your wine, "Home Winemaking Step by Step" is the single best resource for that task.

Jon Iverson has written a book anyone can use with confidence. His writing is straightforward, concise and lay-oriented, and both beginner and advanced winemaker will feel this book was writen for them. For the beginner, it is refreshingly complete. For the advanced winemaker, it contains nuggets of technique and insight that will prove valuable and useful.

Iverson's treatment of acidity, cold soaking and stabilization, extended and carbonic macerations, malolactic fermentation, sparkling wine methods, fining, and oaking are pregnant with value. While most would agree these are advanced topics, Jon works them into the overall process so effortlessly that the beginner might never know he is being ushered through a collegiate. Similarly, the appendices are loaded with procedures, tables, insights, and resources all will find useful.

If you make or want to make grape wines, you really ought to have this book.

The is a clear and concise book about making wine from grapes, the best overall book for beginners and serious home-winemakers. It covers the entire process step-by-step with practical and useful advices. It is simple and yet does not neglect the underlying scientific and technical aspects. Quanities of chemicals and additives are all clearly outlined and adjusted to the volumes typical for home winemaking. The chapter on the use of oak additives is the best in print. It also contains excellent coverage on sanitation, the use of sulphites, racking and fining.

This is a great book to sit down and read through before you begin making wine from grapes. It goes through each step a winemaker follows, from the equipment to the yeast, from fining to fermenting.

It would have been helpful to have more photos and high quality illustrations in the book - you are restricted to simple line drawings when reading about the various things going on in the description. Usually they suffice, though, and you can figure out what to do.

This might not be the best 'only one' book for an all-around winemaker - it concentrates on making wine from grapes, while most home winemakers foray extensively into fruit winemaking. Also, it doesn't have recipes in it, so you'll need a companion book to figure out what you're making. Still, this is a very valuable book and should be on the shelf of any home winemaker.

In 2002, I purchased Jon Iverson's Home Winemaking Step by Step for the first time and found myself venturing into the previously-unknown world of winemaking. I started easy--a Seyval Blanc using EC-1118 yeast. Easy as it was, I was clueless as to how to start and what to do.

Enter Jon Iverson's book. Iverson is a stalwart to the winemaking process and his book has become a well-established resource to newbie and experienced winemakers alike. Without realizing it at the time, I selected a perfect resource to launch me into the wonderful world of winemaking. Pretty much everything I needed to know was covered.

Iverson discusses red and white wines, wines from juice concentrate, crush, fermentation, aging, sulfite management, racking, and various test procedures that educate the reader on the basic chemical properties of wine. He discusses oak and gives educated and knowledgeable recommendations based on his experience. For those interested in delving into a more complex process, malolactic fermentation is also discussed in detail. A troubleshooting section is added to assist if problems occur and he even discusses the bottling process.

The current fourth edition provides added material. This new material includes:

- Enhanced material on grape harvest
- Expanded content on fermenting red and white juice
- New material covering tannins and enzymes
- Additional tables, tips, images, and drawings
- Updated Web site references
- Enhanced index

Iverson's book is well balanced with information presented clearly and concisely. For seasoned winemakers looking for more detail, this may not be the book for you.

While I'm off and running making wine year round, I still find myself occasionally consulting this book as a reference. Detailed discussions relating to chemistry, vinification, and viticulture are not the scope of this book. If more detail is needed, an additional resource should be consulted.

This book is strongly recommended for new winemakers looking for a single resource as a guide through the world of winemaking. From juice in a carboy or barrel to wine on your kitchen table, Home Winemaking Step by Step will help you create wine you'll taste and say, "Wow... I made that!"

Jon Iverson's book, Home Winemaking Step-by-Step is not only well written and thorough, it just as importantly is current - infused with information and understanding of contemporary winemaking technology.

Jon's writing style makes the subject of winemaking easy for the beginner to understand, and yet the book is comprehensive enough to serve as a reference guide for the more advanced winemaker.

I have been teaching winemaking for the past fifteen years. Home Winemaking Step-by-Step is the book I recommend to my students and to which I reference in class.

As long as you're not interested in fruit wines, this book is the one to get for serious beginning winemakers (like me). It's technical in a practical way, with good charts and conversion tables, but very little of the heavy bio-chem stuff that lies beyond this level. Iverson also has the best ideas I've seen for implementing more advanced methods (like extended maceration) with home equipment. More photos would be nice, as would a more detailed description of troubleshooting via sensory analysis, but overall Iverson rates at least 4 stars.

I bought this book b/c I expect to start doing my own winemaking. This
book has a lot of good info and is very informative.

This book approaches the topic from two angles.

1. You'll be making wine from grapes
2. You'll be making wine from kits/concentrates

Now the problem isn't that it covers both topics, but that I was sometimes
unsure which angle the author was coming from.

For example, he talks about various procedures used in the wine making
process. But I was often unsure whether some procedure would only be done
if you were making wine from kits, or if you followed only when making wine from grapes.

So from a beginner's stand-point, reading this book didn't always make sense.
I suppose it will after I start making my own wine, but for a non-experienced beginner, I felt like some clarification needed to be
made as to which steps were followed in each method (grapes or kits).

I think another reviewer used the word "tangled". I kind of have to
agree b/c it wasn't always clear which method the author was referring
to.

First I want to clarify that if you're actually a serious experienced wine maker and want to learn all the ins and outs of perfecting the wines you hand crushed from your private orchard then this is in fact a good book. My beef is that it claims to be for "focused beginners" and it is way too advanced for that.

I was already quite familiar with the similar process of beer brewing so I had a leg up on most people but I still had to read through advanced processes and a sea of chemical terminology hoping they'd be defined and make sense later.

What makes this book poor for newcomers is that it tends to dive straight into specifics without taking a step back and explaining basics like what is going on or why.

What you can expect from this book is more of a reference manual of tips and tricks for perfecting your processes - not book that broadens your general understanding or appreciation of wine.

I am a professional winemaker. I like to support my fellow winemakers but I simply have to put this book in its place. Most of the info in this book is good, but there are simply too many incorrect temperatures, techniques, etc. It is also confusing, because on a given page he may be talking about kit wines, white wines, or red wines. Any author who started out by making kit wines inevitably applies those skewed techniques to the other disciplines. One of my jobs is to make wine for a large winemakers club. I am in charge of sourcing the grapes, the primary fermentations, and technical advice afterwards. Members take their wines home and become their own cellarmasters after primary ferment. The club chose to purchase 40 copies of this book for all of the members. Now many of the members choose to follow techniques outlined in this book, and then I receive phone calls when they have problems!!! What is wrong with this picture? I am a pro--and Iverson is an amatuer. I am not a techno winemaker, and would like to add that making good wine is not difficult, as long as you get good, healthy, ripe grapes, and follow along with the program. Here is an analogy: Making wine is like raising a child. When the wine needs something you do it--pronto! If your small child is hungry, what do you do? "Oh, I'm too busy, I have to go to a meeting or I'm tired etc," NOT! As long as I am on the podium I would also like to say that kit wines are crap. As cool as it is to make your own wines (holistically) you will serve yourself better by buying $5.00 Argentine or Chilean wines. Snob? No. Practical? Yes

Jon's style of writing takes you by the hand and leads you through the entire process of winemaking. From finding the basic tools to using the grapes that are available in your area or having them shipped to you. I'm looking forward to my second bottling soon.