Book suggestions for making fruit wines

[Davidrias]

Absolute beginner and right now I want to try a strawberry/dandelion wine.

I am looking for a good all around book for fruit wines (not a recipe book). Sort of like John Palmers "How to Brew" book for homebrewers.

I don't know much, but just something to walk me through the general process, how to deal with acidity, sugar content, and tannins and what not. Enough so I can begin to create my own recipes and try to get these things right.

Obviously there are many books but not sure which one to pick. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[mhopkins]

I confess, I don't know a book. The most exhaustive recipe source I know of I Jack Keller. Google: jack Keller wine recipes. Some argue that his recipes are a bit light on the fruit (would maybe double some of his recipes). This won't give you the kind of info you mention - acidity, sugar content, and tannins and what not. But, IMHO, it is a site worth perusing if you are interested in making fruit wine. Happy fermentations!

 

[Davidrias]

I confess, I don't know a book. The most exhaustive recipe source I know of I Jack Keller. Google: jack Keller wine recipes. Some argue that his recipes are a bit light on the fruit (would maybe double some of his recipes). This won't give you the kind of info you mention - acidity, sugar content, and tannins and what not. But, IMHO, it is a site worth perusing if you are interested in making fruit wine. Happy fermentations!

Ok thanks! I think he has a recipe for dandelion/strawberry too. Problem is, I am only using from my little patch and probably won't get as much as he calls for.

 

[salcoco]

visit morewinemaking.com. scroll down home page to bottom and click on more manuals. books on wine making.

 

[Medic8106]

Jack Keller's site is very good. Sometimes light on fruit and high ABV so watch the hydrometer readings instead of cookbook recipes. Also, the recipes leave out some steps that it is assumed you already know about the wine making process. He has 30 or so dandelion recipes, I use #20 however ran into a problem this year because I forgot to add kmeta at the beginning. Good luck!

 

[winemaker81]

The book I started with is Stanley F Anderson's The Art of Making Wine. I have the 1970 edition; on Amazon I see they updated it in 1991. The book describes the basics and may be what is desired.

Do you have a wine making supply within driving distance? If so, stop by (or these days -- call), see what they have, and talk to them. If you're lucky the staff will be knowledgeable and helpful.

I assume you want a book so you can have it on hand when making wine. My advice is to use multiple sources -- get a book and read multiple sites. Before starting a batch of wine, read multiple recipes. There are far more bad recipes available than good. If you have questions, post them -- someone will be knowledgeable on the topic and offer advice.


I checked -- Don Buchan, the keeper of the UseNet group rec.crafts.winemaking FAQ, still has the FAQ and a zipped archive of collected recipes on his site:

https://www.malak.ca/rcw.faq.htmlhttps://www.malak.ca/wine/
He stopped updating the FAQ in 1999, so it a tad out of date .... however, some might find it interesting to see what wine making on the net was like 20-25 years ago.

Please note that the recipes are not vetted -- his effort was to capture posts before they cycled off UseNet and were lost.

 

[Rice_Guy]

Your post suggests you are a chef or a product developer who is doing new products. A lot of the creation of new is based on balancing ingredient/ flavors and nutrients you have available. The other concerns are yeast fermentations (yeast nutrition) and shelf life (oxidation reactions).

. Most books focus on grape, as a non-grape person you will have to read between the lines and translate. Technique will translate and with a good beer book you have this already a handle on technique. Grapes have most of what one wants from a flavor and nutrient point of view so non grape wine starts by building a synthetic system that resembles grape juice.
. Most non-grape books are recipes like Keller on the web. They will not tell you how to balance yeast nutrition or flavors, , , which you are doing if you create a recipe from scratch.

Absolute beginner and right now I want to try a strawberry/dandelion wine. . . . . I don't know much, but just something to walk me through the general process, how to deal with acidity, sugar content, and tannins and what not. Enough so I can begin to create my own recipes and try to get these things right.

OK #1 this forum is a good place to try ideas, it has a variety of folks who will help you put a synthetic system together. #2 meads deal with a nutrient deficient system so it is a place to start thinking about healthy yeast, an entry level book is ‘Making Wild Wines and Meads’ Vargas & Gulling, for a bit more detail ‘The Complete Meadmaker’ Schramm. #3 As with cooking flavors are a balance and a lot of this is subjective/ hedonic. At the lab bench we use test systems to play with flavors and speed development time (wine 6 months plus). With wine I try weird ideas out in a pie ex a web recipe of dandelion (weak flavor) with ginger (strong flavor). You should consider at the minimum trying a tea with new ideas, you may find the day picking dandelion was hidden under 15 minutes of slicing strawberries. #4 Another approach could be always assume yeast nutrition is zip and start all recipes with EC Kraus’s chemical version of dandelion wine (no raisins/ oranges etc) and then add any flavor ingredients on top of this.

Your post suggests you want to do what I do, ex the next batch probably will be rhurbarb (acid and aromatic) combined with 5% crab apple (tannin and red color). I am not aware of an entry level book that covers function of an ingredient to build a novel wine. By the way, I read ‘The Journal of Food Science’.
I will be interested to see what you try.

 

[Davidrias]

Your post suggests you are a chef or a product developer who is doing new products. A lot of the creation of new is based on balancing ingredient/ flavors and nutrients you have available. The other concerns are yeast fermentations (yeast nutrition) and shelf life (oxidation reactions).

. Most books focus on grape, as a non-grape person you will have to read between the lines and translate. Technique will translate and with a good beer book you have this already a handle on technique. Grapes have most of what one wants from a flavor and nutrient point of view so non grape wine starts by building a synthetic system that resembles grape juice.
. Most non-grape books are recipes like Keller on the web. They will not tell you how to balance yeast nutrition or flavors, , , which you are doing if you create a recipe from scratch.

OK #1 this forum is a good place to try ideas, it has a variety of folks who will help you put a synthetic system together. #2 meads deal with a nutrient deficient system so it is a place to start thinking about healthy yeast, an entry level book is ‘Making Wild Wines and Meads’ Vargas & Gulling, for a bit more detail ‘The Complete Meadmaker’ Schramm. #3 As with cooking flavors are a balance and a lot of this is subjective/ hedonic. At the lab bench we use test systems to play with flavors and speed development time (wine 6 months plus). With wine I try weird ideas out in a pie ex a web recipe of dandelion (weak flavor) with ginger (strong flavor). You should consider at the minimum trying a tea with new ideas, you may find the day picking dandelion was hidden under 15 minutes of slicing strawberries. #4 Another approach could be always assume yeast nutrition is zip and start all recipes with EC Kraus’s chemical version of dandelion wine (no raisins/ oranges etc) and then add any flavor ingredients on top of this.

Your post suggests you want to do what I do, ex the next batch probably will be rhurbarb (acid and aromatic) combined with 5% crab apple (tannin and red color). I am not aware of an entry level book that covers function of an ingredient to build a novel wine. By the way, I read ‘The Journal of Food Science’.
I will be interested to see what you try.

Wow thanks so much for putting the effort in to this post. I'll take the next few weeks to read up on some things. I guess I'll just need to gather a variety of sources and maybe start with whatever books are available.

I've made two batches in the past, an elderberry wine and a raspberry wine, but I didn't put much effort into it and just basically follow recipes.

I've made a lot of homebrew, so I have that knowledge but not all of it translates obviously. But things like yeast health, sugar content, and fermentation do. I do have a pH meter and am a scientist of sorts in my career, so enjoy focusing on the technical details, and I know things like acidity and tannins are very important for with wines so that's the stuff I would like to learn. How to manipulate and measure these things to get the final product that I want.

So thanks again! I'll be using everyone's replies here for sure. Just was hoping to get pointed towards some resources by people in the know instead of just picking random ones on my own. Very helpful.

 

[Rice_Guy]

HUMM elderberry-
my favorite from 2017 was an elderberry recipe where I switched water with concord grape, the purpose of elderberry was tannic bitter flavor notes and the concord was there for long lasting foxy aromatics and background yeast nutrition.

 

[BernardSmith]

Here's the thing: because wine making is simply introducing yeast to fermentable sugars that don't require any additional "work" by wine makers compared to brewers and because wine makers tend not to have the same anxieties about spoilage bacteria that brewers do there tends to be far fewer books on wine making than on brewing. And what you get are recipe collections that don't really explain the underlying processes so you get "cookbooks" rather than learn how to make really good wines - whether from grapes, berries, stone fruit, flowers, honey or "sweet teas".
Four books I would recommend are
1. Techniques in Home Wine Making by Daniel Pambianchi. This is based on grape wines and it will provide you with a lot of the science that undergirds the art of wine making.
2. Strong Waters by Scott Mansfield not so much for his explanation of wine making but for his imagination and use of substrates that you may not have thought about.
3. More about cider making but again the author provides a good understanding of the science of wine making - Claude Jolicoeur's The New Cider Maker's Handbook, and then there is
4. Ken Schramm's The Compleat Meadmaker. This focuses solely on honey wines - meads but Schramm may be the best mead maker in the USA today.

 

[John Arild Olsen]

Have a look at Amazon.co.uk, the Brits have long traditions in country wine making

 

[Davidrias]

The book I started with is Stanley F Anderson's The Art of Making Wine. I have the 1970 edition; on Amazon I see they updated it in 1991. The book describes the basics and may be what is desired.

Do you have a wine making supply within driving distance? If so, stop by (or these days -- call), see what they have, and talk to them. If you're lucky the staff will be knowledgeable and helpful.

I assume you want a book so you can have it on hand when making wine. My advice is to use multiple sources -- get a book and read multiple sites. Before starting a batch of wine, read multiple recipes. There are far more bad recipes available than good. If you have questions, post them -- someone will be knowledgeable on the topic and offer advice.


I checked -- Don Buchan, the keeper of the UseNet group rec.crafts.winemaking FAQ, still has the FAQ and a zipped archive of collected recipes on his site:

https://www.malak.ca/rcw.faq.htmlhttps://www.malak.ca/wine/
He stopped updating the FAQ in 1999, so it a tad out of date .... however, some might find it interesting to see what wine making on the net was like 20-25 years ago.

Please note that the recipes are not vetted -- his effort was to capture posts before they cycled off UseNet and were lost.

Thanks. I have a homebrew shop mostly that sells wine stuff, he may know a bit though. It's a good point. That website looks like it has a ton of info. Thanks a bunch for helping!

 

[Wine Lab]

Best fruit winemaking book I have read, available on Amazon. It is based on small scale commercial fruit wine production, but covers everything the home fruit winemaker needs to know.

 

[Vinobeau]

When I started in 1973, I used "First Steps In Winemaking" by CJJ Berry. Amazon still has it for sale.

 

[Davidrias]

Best fruit winemaking book I have read, available on Amazon. It is based on small scale commercial fruit wine production, but covers everything the home fruit winemaker needs to know.

I might try that. Seems the reviews aren't that great. But worth a shot.

 

[BernardSmith]

CJJ Berry is for all intents and purposes a collection of about 130 recipes. His recipes are good but like cook books, they don't teach you how to cook. They teach you recipes. But following a recipe is not the same thing as learning how to cook. Anyone who can read can follow a recipe. But cooks don't need recipes to cook and sadly, after reading dozens of recipe books you may not know how to cook any better than someone opening up a recipe book for the very first time...

 

[Scooter68]

Best fruit winemaking book I have read, available on Amazon. It is based on small scale commercial fruit wine production, but covers everything the home fruit winemaker needs to know.

Based on the reviews I read, it is really not for beginning wine makers, but rather talks about small commercial winery operations.

 

[Wine Lab]

Agree, the negative reviews have some validity to them as this book is not a typical home fruit winemaker recipe book that people are looking for, it is geared to the small commercial fruit winery. The author, Dominic Rivard, is a commercial fruit wine consultant, worldwide, and is very knowledgeable in fruit wine making, but he earns his bread and butter being a consultant to the fruit wine industry and so will not be focusing on giving away home fruit winemaking recipes. Both the book and his website - How to Make Cider and Mead to Start a Winery, are geared to the small commercial fruit winemaker. Nevertheless, I still think there is information in this book that is valuable to the home fruit winemaker that is unavailable in other fruit winemaking books, and is worth a gander. But no, it is not the home fruit winemaker book that explains everything about the science of fruit wines along with recipes that we would like to see, so if that is what you are looking for or what you need, this not the book for you.

 

[Davidrias]

thanks to all for your replies. Lots of info here and hopefully will be helpful to others. Almost sounds like there is an opportunity here for someone