Sound Wine

Most home winemaking books are written as encouragement. Encouragement is what loses people twenty-three litres.

This one starts from the failures. Of the nineteen things that commonly go wrong with home wine, six cannot be reversed at all, seven are a coin toss, and six have a reliable remedy that works only if you catch it within days. Knowing which is which is worth more than any technique, and no other book in this category will tell you.

Then the arithmetic that prevents most of them: sugar, acid, pH, yield, and a sulphite dose calculated against the pH of the finished wine rather than a habit. That last one matters more than it sounds. The same thirty parts per million is over-protective at pH 3.0 and close to decorative at pH 3.8, and Chapter 4 includes the correction this site had to make to its own arithmetic when it got that wrong.

185 pages. Metric and US customary units throughout, computed rather than converted by hand. No distillation content, deliberately.