Home bottles and barrels

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33775, 22 February 1975, Page 10

Home bottles and barrels

Good Housekeeping. Home Made Wine and Beer. By S. W. Andrews. Ebury Press. 159 pp. N.Z. price $6.20. Amateur winemaking has come a long way since the days a couple of decades ago of Peggy Hutchinson’s home-made wine mainly through the availability of modem equipment, improved strains of yeast, and — last but not least — the efforts of men like S. W. Andrews to bring an understanding of modem winemaking techniques to a big and increasing Mr Andrews, who lives in Hertford, where he works for a general hospital, has kept bees and made mead — honey wine — for more than 25 years, and made wine and beer almost as long. He has been leader of the Winemakers of Hertford since 1957, has held office in the British National Association of Amateur Winemakers for 15 years, and was president in 1973. Now he has, as the dust jacket says, “passed on the secrets of his success” — if they can be called secrets. Really, his book is simply a straightforward and comprehensive guide which gives winemakers pretty well all the information they need about the craft: step-by-step instructions for the amateur and some new insights for the grizzled veteran. Mr Andrews deals, in this order, with technical terms, equipment, the ingredients (a handy table lists fruits acceptable for winemaking and the

types of wines that can be made from them), acid and tannin, fermentation, racking and clarification, cellarcraft, wine disorders, grapes and grape wine, wine recipes, beer, and mead. His recipes generally follow the modem trend to use smaller quantities of fruit to produce lighter, drier wines that mature quickly. To a moderately experienced eye they seem to be sensible and well balanced. Naturally, it would take a year or two to put this observation to the test, which is beyond the scope of a review. Mr Andrews writes briefly but adequately on beer. His chapter on mead, though also brief, is crammed with information. If there is a fault in the book, it is that insufficient attention is paid to the varieties of fruit suitable for winemaking. Several varieties of apple are mentioned, and three plums (one of which is not grown in New Zealand because of its susceptibility to silver leaf disease), but no pears and no gooseberries. Peaches, Mr Andrews says, make a wine “considered to be second in quality only to a grape wine.” What he does not say' is that many varieties of peach make a very bland and insipid wine. This is a minor criticism of a book which is a comprehensive and comprehensible guide to an old craft undergoing a new life — a more expensive book than some of its competitors, but one well worth the price of entry.