The Joy of Home Winemaking
Written: Jun 15 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Warm confidence-building style ideal for beginners with plenty for the rest!
Cons: Conless
The Bottom Line: Get this one to make your first ever wine from, or for the great recipes if you are already established
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| snpmurray's Full Review: Terry A. Garey - The Joy of Home Winemaking |
If you can make a cup of tea you can make your own wine. It's as simple as that, and uses similar amounts of time. I don't know about the rest of the alcohol consuming adult population out there, but I can sit and watch a gallon jug bubble away furiously for hours to itself, content in the knowledge that each of those billions of tiny bubbles represents the conversion of a tiny grain of sugar into a tiny drop of booze.
Terry Garey, author of this book, shares my particular form of joy de vivre in this regard, and also the understanding that all potential winemakers should be made full converts to actual winemakers, if for no better reason than it offers more chances of getting wines as birthday gifts.
Garey begins her book by giving the practical advice for beginning winemakers......
“Do the best you can and don’t worry”
Winemaking is a forgiving process if you follow a few simple rules, and you can soon graduate from Garey’s first recipe, little more than frozen apple juice and frozen lemonade, to using whatever fruit is going cheap at your local farmers market, or whatever berries you can’t possibly eat more of out of your own garden. Soon you can have in your home, occupying only the most modest amount of space, five or six gallons of different wines all fizzing their way to the day when you can open a bottle of each and sit with last years brewing notes and decide what worked and what didn’t....was adding an extra pound of sugar a good idea? How was your banana wine effected by using honey instead of sugar?
Sound enticing easy and spectacularly rewarding? Yep, that’s winemaking.
Garey, like most excellent home winemakers, carries no especial qualifications which put letters after your name. In her introduction she explains that her only qualification for writing a book of this kind is her love of the process and the product and the culture, and that she has been doing it for many years. She opens immediately with a warm style, and with confidence enough to show others who are just dying to get their feet wet (if not their palates) how easy the first batch can be. I was drawn instantly to her style, in her acknowledgements she thanks not only other winemakers, but the Minnesota Science Fiction Society for simply being there. Wine and imagination, you see, go hand in hand.
The main hurdle that the prospective home winemaker has to overcome is that they believe that they won’t be able to do it. When friends tell me they have reservations about re-plastering their hallway, I confirm that their reservations are justified, but when it comes to making a gallon of wine, such reservations always make me chuckle. Terry Garey spends a good third of this book coaxing the reader past this stage. In order to do so, she uses a genius strategy, having the first batch be made using an old gallon jug, an elastic band, a bit of plastic sheet and two things of frozen juice and lemonade. Think I reduce her? I do not! I grant you, this is not going to be Chateau Rothschild, but it produces a drinkable wine, I’ve made it (if only out of gory fascination!)
Having thus broken in the novice winemaker, she proceeds to fill you in on the more advanced techniques of putting a two dollar vapor lock on top of your gallon jug, on stirring in some “wine medicine” which will make it clearer, and on using fresh fruit instead of frozen juice.
We are still a long way from rocket science here.
I personally have a number of hobbies that my wife permits me to indulge in the dead of night after the kids are asleep. By far the lowest tech of these is my winemaking. I consider myself an intermediate winemaker, of moderate experience and practiced technique. I have spent perhaps fifty dollars in the past five years on hardware for my hobby. Terry Garey in the intermediate section acknowledges that there is an unlimited number of gadgets you can add to your winemaking repertoire, and talks you through why exactly you don’t really need most of them. This is the right book for the person who has persuaded their loved one to give a corner of the cellar over to them. If you have home made chutneys and jams on your kitchen shelves, Terry Garey lives on your plane of existence. If you possess a wine refrigerator, you may have more money than sense, and only the occupational therapy of making wine in an old bucket for the next ten years can save your economic acumen and give you the wines you want at the price your friends won’t believe. I have met the wine refrigerator crowd and I liked their style, but no-one who has a wine refrigerator ever seems to have tasted carrot and dandelion wine. These categories should not be mutually exclusive! This book is all about understanding what you need and what you don’t. The rest is in here too, but it is clear that the author is all about quality home made wine, which is neither complicated or particularly advantaged by possession of fancy equipment.
The intermediate section of this book also contains the most marked value one finds within it’s covers....the authors own wine recipes! Home winemaking permits one to stretch the imagination to it’s limits, and this author has clearly done exactly that. I would not of my own accord followed a recipe for pea pod wine, but Terry Garey persuaded me to do so, and I was favorably surprised with the results! When one reads someone who one trusts, it is easier to give a year to one of their funky wine recipes.
Here is a list of some of the other groovy recipes Terry gives us from her own no doubt interesting cellar..
Raspberry wine (highly recommended!)
Banana wine
Currant wine
Elderberry wine (a personal old friend/crutch of mine)
Gooseberry wine
Melon wine
Orange wine
Canned peach halves wine
Canned pie cherry wine
Golden raisin wine
Date wine (the fruit, not the testing guinea pig variety!)
Carrot wine
Parsnip wine
Mint wine
Herb wine
Heck, there are even recipes for grape wine if you really want to live that pedestrian!
Should all of this be old hat to you, first, email me and let me know when I can drop round for a sample of your cellar, but don’t disregard this book yet. The final section is on more advanced techniques and complex recipes, but again Garey begins by reassuring you (probably intermediate winemaker who has a system and knows how to stick to it.....yours truly for example) that there is nothing here you cant handle. Blending wines, adjusting acidity, spice wines, this is the kind of stuff covered here. The author gives usher personally manufactured tables of what flavors go together and what do not.
All in all, this is really the book for you if you are at any stage of your winemaking lifespan, and want something new and different with a warm and personal tone. I love this book, and my copy is well loved, wrinkled and water damaged, and most good cook books should be!
Recommended:
Yes
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