Customer Reviews

A Practical Guide to Making Wines and Beers from Concentrates

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought the book after I had been making wine for 4 years. Dwight does offer clear and concise instructions. There are some things I don't do or find necessary, such as soaking the corks for 12 hours before bottling. I find 15 to 20 minutes is usually enough. I have always been able to use warm tap water without affecting the fermentation, but this may vary for household to household, depending on the amount of water flushed throught the HW tank in a week.

I also make wine from unconcentrated juice bought at a local Italian Supermarket and Dwight has been helpful in this process, although the main instructions came from a supplier, Spagnols in Vancouver.

As a food technologist and a home winemaker, I was interested in this book. Not only am I amazed at the depth of Dwight's misunderstanding of process technology, but his off-the-cuff junk-science explanations for chemical interactions made me laugh at several points. Avoid this book: there are better ones out there.

If you, like me, have found manufacturer's instructions that come with wine kits a bit vague, and often even contradictory, you will love this small volume. Dwight tells it "like it is" without excess verbiage, giving us the benefit of many year's experience in wine and beer making. He offers the amateur some real choices in techniques and equipment, and some very enlightening advice on timing, especially. His concise explanations of what each added chemical does is especially valuable, as that can lead to you making "educated" choices rather than "let's see what this might do" ones. As he says, winemaking and beer making are arts, not sciences, and he suggests how we can add our own artistic license to the seemingly scientific instructions that come in the box. Especially given the low price, buying this book should be a no brainer!