Book Review: 101 Recipes for Making Wild Wines At Home

101 Recipes for Making Wild Wines At Home: A Step by Step Guide to Using Herbs, Fruits, and Flowers by John Peragine is a little difficult for me to review the “How To” section because I use Terry Geary’s book instead. This book is new out on the market, published in 2010, and is organized a bit like a “For Dummies” book with boxes. I like it because it has case studies of real people making wine.

Compared to Making Wild Wines & Meads, it is a bit clunky finding recipes. Each recipe has a cute little name. It brings a smile to your face, but you don’t really know what the wine is made from or the finished style. Maybe Making Wild Wines & Meads lacked creativity, but it is much easier to look up a carrot wine in that book than having to figure out that a carrot wine in this book is called “What’s Up Doc?” Plus, the recipes are just thrown in the book with no order and no groupings of plants. The index, too, is strange. For instance, Cherry can be found on pages “273-274, 120-124, 237, 241, 249, 257, 260.” Why are they not put in order in which they appear in the book?

The back of the book does have some good things in it. The last chapter, for instance, is “Ten Common Winemaking Problems.”Appendix A is a table on wine yeasts, which I have not seen in another fruit wine making book, and Appendix B contains some more personal narrations by various home wine makers.

Admittedly, I have not yet bought this book, but instead just checked it out from the library. I’m not completely sure that I will buy it, either, and just read the interesting stories.