|
Published:
November 23, 2010

Home Winemaking For Dummies

Overview

An informative, fun guide to making your own wine

It's estimated that one million North Americans make their own wine. Relatively inexpensive to make (a homemade bottle costs from $2 to $4), a bottle with your own label (and grapes) is a fantasy even someone with modest aspirations can fulfill. Author Tim Patterson, an award-winning home winemaker, shows how it's possible for anyone to create a great wine. In Home Winemaking For Dummies, he

discusses the art of winemaking from grape to bottle, including how to get the best grapes (and figure out how many you need); determine what equipment is required; select the right yeast and figure out if any other additives are needed; and store, age, and test wine. With detailed tips on creating many varieties -- from bold reds and demure whites to enchanting rosés and delightful sparkling wines -- this guide is your ultimate winemaking resource.

Read More

About The Author

Tim Patterson writes about wine and makes some of his own in Berkeley, California. He contributes the monthly "Inquiring Winemaker" column for the industry trade magazine Wines & Vines, digging into winemaking theories and techniques, and he covered home winemaking for several years in the pages of WineMaker. He has won dozens of Gold medals, Double Golds, and Best of Shows from amateur winemaking competitions in California.

Sample Chapters

home winemaking for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Making wine at home lets you explore your creative side — from choosing the perfect grapes to learning the lingo of wine-speak. Making your own wine is also a great way to unleash your inner science geek. You need to calculate conversions, understand wine chemistry (including sugar and pH levels), and regulate temperatures, all while paying attention to the basic laws of home winemaking.

HAVE THIS BOOK?

Articles from
the book

If you’re a home winemaker anywhere in the world, at some point you’ll probably need to convert metric measures to U.S. measures and vice versa. The following table shows some of the key conversions winemakers need: Quantity U.S. Measures Metric Measures Vineyard yield (premium grapes) 3 to 5 U.S. tons per acre 6 to 9 metric tons per hectare Grape weight to wine volume (commercial) 1 U.
Winemaking is too much of an art to have real laws, like the laws of physics, but home winemakers are well advised to keep these four principles in mind at all times: Useful obsessions: You cannot worry too much about sanitation, temperature, and oxygen. Buckets: You cannot possibly have too many buckets available in your winery.
As a first-time winemaker, you want to set yourself up for success from the start. The grapes in the following table give you a great shot at overcoming beginner’s jitters over style, taste, and technique: Reds Whites: Zinfandel: The All-American red (originally from Croatia), full of fruit and spice, good in every style from rosé to blockbuster.
Making wine at home lets you explore your creative side — from choosing the perfect grapes to learning the lingo of wine-speak. Making your own wine is also a great way to unleash your inner science geek. You need to calculate conversions, understand wine chemistry (including sugar and pH levels), and regulate temperatures, all while paying attention to the basic laws of home winemaking.
Good home winemaking involves careful temperature control — your wine wants to be warm sometimes (and generates a bit of heat itself during fermentation), but then things need to cool down, especially for storage. The following table shows some key temperature targets for making and storing wine in Fahrenheit
As a home winemaker, you need to know certain properties of your grapes and wine, whether you ever took a chemistry class or not. The following list offers the key chemical components and how to measure them: Acidity: The key to how refreshing your wine is in the glass, and the way to control problem pH is in acidity.
As a home winemaker, you ferment grapes to produce your own wine. Along the way, you use some unique tools and techniques, as well as some words that have distinct meaning for winemakers. Brush up on your wine-speak with these essential terms: Brix: Measure of sugar percentage by weight in a liquid — in this case, grape juice.
https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6630d85d73068bc09c7c436c/69195ee32d5c606051d9f433_4.%20All%20For%20You.mp3

Frequently Asked Questions

No items found.