Customer Reviews

Making Wild Wines & Meads: 125 Unusual Recipes Using Herbs, Fruits, Flowers & More

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

From the novice vinter to a more experienced hand, this book is one of the better ones I have seen. At the start, the author describes and explains the homewine-making process, the equiptment necessary, the "lingo", and gives a desent time-line for completion. The recipies are usually simple and are for one-gallon batches. Some are a little weird, but it does say "unusual" in the title. A definate recommendation for anyone who is avidly homebrewing wine or mead.

Wassail!

Many years ago when I started making my own wine, I had receipes for fruit wines including Pineapple, Strawberry and even a Strawberry/Vanilla wine. I lost that small book and went without for many years. If you have any interest in making fruit and herb wines (They Make Great Gifts!) then try this book. It will keep you busy for quite some time.

I got this book for my first winemaking book, and used one of
the blackberry wine recipes for my first batch. The recipes
are just recipes, without the minute detail, and it was hard
to turn back and forth from the recipes to the 'how to' intro
to get the general detailed steps, and there were a couple of
steps that I wasn't sure exactly what to do. Also, there are
tips I could have used, for example the siphoning; the book
makes it sound simple but it was very frustrating, and there
are tools available to start the siphon that I hope will be
very useful.

The book is very inspiring and the recipes are diverse and
interesting, I expect to use it again.

I'm going to break my review of this book into two components, the instructions (which gets a 3) and the recipe section (which gets a 5).

Instructions:
Simple and straightforward, this would be a great book for someone starting out in the hobby (though probably not as a first and only book on the subject). As far as the instructions are concerned I would recommend this to anyone who has read a more detailed book on home brewing and maybe felt a little overwhelmed, but who isn't ready to give up on it. The directions are stolid, basic, "tried and true" instructions with a few procedural options thrown in, but not enough to overwhelm (and believe me, brewing can get AWFULLY overwhelming). If you're old hat at home brewing don't expect any mystical revelations, but it is probably worth taking a skim-through to get a feel for the author's intentions.

The section on sterilization was unexpectedly thin. Considering all the items they recommend you get from a brew supply already, household bleach should not be the focus of the sterilization section.

Recipes:
This is where for me this book shines. The recipes take up about 2/3 of the book and range everywhere from the tried and true classics (grape, peach, strawberry, honey) to the really outré (beet wine anyone? how about snap pea? or crabapple?). For an experienced brewer with a few books under their belt there might not be so many forays into the "wild" as the title might suggest, but the recipe list would look pretty out-there to someone primarily used to grape table wines.

There are variations of most of the wines to account for different tastes without filling half the book with tiny alterations of the same recipe. They provide both a sweet and dry variation of many recipes, and several include versions which account for different varieties of the same fruit or levels of ripeness. There is a separate mead section but many of the wines also use honey as the main sugar additive, so there's a lot of opportunity for experimentation if that is an interest of yours.

Some brew science is still a bit deeper then I'm personally interested in going right now, and sometimes it's awfully nice to be able follow a pre-tested recipe to approximate the results I'm looking for rather then having to calculate every single additive based on tables and graphs. I think that alone will keep this book near the top of my reference pile for this hobby.

Yield for each of these recipes is one gallon, which is a nice economical size for testing out something. The cost of fresh fruit and honey can add up fast, and in the worst case scenario it can be no fun having to get rid of five gallons of something that turned out badly after what could even be several years of work and patience. While authors assume sulfiting as a baseline procedure, they continually remind that this is optional and do discuss the necessary preparation differences in each recipe. This is highly appreciated for those of us who prefer not to use sulfites.

In the end I still think the best judge of an instructional book is if reading it makes me start a mental wish-list of what to buy the next time I play with that specific hobby, and I've already started working out the contents of my next brew-store order.

The title suggest "wild recipes" and I thought that recipes would be presented which you can make mainly with wild or backyard ingredients, maybe even using wild yeasts. Instead it is a pretty usual wine making book. Nearly all recipes ask for fruit juice concentrate, even for very unusual concentrates. I have no idea where to get these concentrates, certainly not in the next supermarket.
For this reason, I think that the title is very misleading as it suggests real "back to the basic" recipes.

This book provides a lot of good recipes for pretty much any kind of wine you could ever hope to brew in those spare glass jugs sitting in your basement. Have a lot of dandelions in your lawn in the spring? Don't kill them or pull them out; turn them into home-brewed wine!

My fiance and I have thus far made blueberry wine, strawberry mead, and mint mead, and all seem to be coming along very well. Of course, we won't know until next year, when they are ready, but preliminary "tests" (sips here and there to check process) suggest the recipes are spot on. They aren't organic or minimalist recipes, though. You will be instructed to buy tannins, yeast nutrients, and acid blends, but you can find any of those at a decent liquor store or online. Because the recipes are full of what some may consider unnecessary chemicals, and because I haven't yet enjoyed an entire bottle of fully developed wine, I give this book 4 stars. So far, though, I am really pleased with it. However, do not purchase expecting a whole lot of instructions as to the actual wine-making process. While it's not too difficult once one is familiar with the process, this book is more of a recipe book than an instructional text.

In a well thought-out and easy to use guide, MAKING WILD WINES & MEADS is a great beginner's book that my boyfriend and I will be using to start our first batches of beverages. As amateurs, this guide has a great variety of recipes and presents basic topics in a clear, concise way that delves into enough detail without miring you down in facts. The order of topics is also very logical: we're first introduced to what we need to start making wine as well as necessary equipment, and items that are nice to have. Recipes come at the end -- you know, after you actually figure out how to make a recipe come together. These include a good mixture of non-grape ingredients found at both your local supermarket and farmer's markets for foods as diverse as cherries and blueberries, plus more unusual ingredients like herbs and flowers. An informative, all-inclusive how-to guide for beginners and wine enthusiasts.

I love making mead, and this book gave me many ideas for new recipes and combinations. I doubt I'll follow any of their recipes exactly (since I don't cook my honey), but it certainly gives me a place to start. It was worth buying to have on hand.

I bought this book for the mead making content. It has about 40 pages of material on mead making including some excellent recipes. One of the better mead books I have read and pretty much read them all. Not necessarily for an absolute beginner but if you know a little bit about mead or wine making this is perfect for you. For example the recipes use pectic enzyme, campden tablets and wine tannin. Clearly written and easy to understand.

I got this book for Christmas two years ago, and just bottled my first batch of apple melomel. I'm pleased with the end result, and there are some amazing-looking recipes in this book. Although it doesn't quite contain all of the practical information I would've liked to have starting out, and I wish there was more discussion of ways to make sulfite-free wines, it is a great book for beginners and I highly recommend it. Next project: Apricot wine.