First Steps in Winemaking: A Complete Month-By-Month Guide to Winemaking in Your Home

This is an excellent short book which covers a lot for anyone investigating or exploring Winemaking, the greater part of the book is a selection of recipes, some of which sound very, very interesting or intriguing and would not exactly be what you may expect when creating wines if you have little experience beyond red, white, rosie, sparkling (as I did prior to reading this).Good picture illustrations accompany the text, it is clear, understandable and concise in delivery, the writing style and pace are good too. The narrative does not suffer from becoming dull or an uneven pace of delivery, at one point interesting, at another difficult to understand or repetitive or unnecessarily long winded. It might be possible to discover a lot of similar content online for free, although I doubt it would prove as interesting a read and this is arranged and assembled and presented very well as a single source.I would say that the reading experience is a good one, whether you plan to put into practice the content or directions or not. I would suggest however that if you are buying this you really should think about it as a guide or manual since such a portion of it is recipes and directions. It is not so much a connoisseurs guide, tasters notes or anything of that kind. It is also "first steps" in wine making, I suspect there are much more in depth or long winded guides to fermentation which would have much expanded content on the science or various techniques, this is a very good place to begin though.I have another guide by the author which relates to beers, ales and porters, if I remember properly, and I look forward to reading it now, possibly trying out some of its ideas, given how pleasing this read has turned out to be.

Excellent book for the beginner in home wine making. I had an original copy for many years and had passed on to a nephew and as I have just returned to the hobby it was the first book I looked for because even after all these years it's still an excellent reference to home wine making and it gives seasonal recipes.

I started wine making 25 years ago, learning from this book. I then packed it up for years and only lately came back to wine making. I bought a couple of other books but had very disappointing results. I now have another copy of the book and love it, It gives lots of explanations that are important to know in a well written style, although properly old-fashioned. As a reference book I use it all the time. The recipes make some good wines too!

This book is as old as the hills - my previous copy dates from 1970 - but it is still an absolutely first-rate guide to winemaking, with numerous recipes. It gives the beginner just the right amount of technical information, without being intimidating, and is written in a friendly, readable style.My only criticism is that if you follow the author's recommendations on sugar use, you will end up with fairly strong wines, as yeasts nowadays ferment up to higher alcohol levels than when the book was written. This means that what might have turned out to be a moderately strong medium or sweet wine in the 1960s will now end up as a dry wine which may be excessively strong for many people's tastes: not everyone wants a wine nearly the strength of sherry with their meals.Fermentation is also much quicker with today's yeasts - hardly a problem, but it does make Mr. Berry's remarks about wine taking 6 months to ferment out seem rather dated: these days a wine can ferment out in a few weeks.

I bought this book because I owned an earlier version of it over twenty years ago, since when I stopped making wine, only to now fancy giving it another go. It was a good book then, and still is, but is SOOOOOO dated, e.g prices are as at 1995. Come on, it can't be THAT difficult to update, surely?So, I reckon it is now just OK, and lacks reference to recent ideas and preferences. I am still glad I bought it, but it isn't the 'Bible' that it once was.

Very good book explaining how to get started with wine making.Rather out of date but the methods still apply.Good selection or recipes.Recommended.

...so much so that I decided to give home brewing a go and bought this book to assist.It's a brilliantly informative guide which gives a good overview to the basics of winemaking and explains the background to topics such as sterilising, the fermentation process, acidity, racking, clearing and how to use a hydrometer to estimate alcohol content. There are also plenty of tips and troubleshooting if and when you should encounter any problems. A large number of seasonal wine recipes also accompany the text.It's perhaps a trifle dated but, given that it was first published in 1960, that's not too surprising. The information contained within the book is still perfectly valid and I'm sure that it will continue to be a useful reference for many more years to come.A thoroughly useful companion for winemakers beginners!

When taking my first steps into making country wines, I found this book bulging with very interesting valuable information. Including recipes with step by step instruction. A must have when starting out