Reviews Cooking, Food And Wine Book

Product Details

From the Back Cover
Go Wild!

Make Extraordinary Homemade Wines from Everything but Grapes!

Elegant, exotic wines, honey meads, spicy metheglins, and fruity melomels -- there's no end to great-tasting elixirs you can make using ingredients from your local market and even your own backyard!

You'll find easy, step-by-step winemaking instructions plus memorable recipes, including:

-- Apricot Wine

-- Dry Mead

-- Marigold Wine

-- Almond Wine

-- Cherry Melomel

-- Cranberry Claret

-- Peapod Wine

-- Lemon-Thyme Metheglin

--Strawberry Wine

-- Rose Hip Melomel

About the Author
Pattie Vargas is an avid home winemaker. He is co-author of several books on the subject, including Cordials from Your Kitchen and Country Wines, which has been revised and is now titled Making Wild Wines & Meads. Pattie is the Editorial Project Manager at Mazer Corporation and has won several awards. She is a member of the National Press Women's Association and National Council for the Social Studies. Pattie has three children and four grandchildren.

Besides working as an Internet consultant, She lives in Ohio.

Richard Gulling is an avid home winemaker. He is co-author of several books on the subject, including Cordials from Your Kitchen and Country Wines, which has been revised and is now titled Making Wild Wines & Meads. Richard is a pharmacy manager whose background in chemistry helped refine and modernize their winemaking process. He lives in Ohio.

Customer Reviews

A basic overview with a couple of neat twists
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.

Good beginners' guide.
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.

Wild Wines and Meads
This book is full of the most interesting and wonderful recipes for mead that I have seen so far. Simple, easy to follow instructions. No guesswork. Love it!