I would have given this book a higher rating if it had been titled the Beginners guide to making wine, because that it what it actually is. The book only covers making wine from grape concentrate – anyone who wants to press their own grapes or make elderberry or dandelion wine will be disappointed. If you want to buy concentrate and age it in carbuoys (demijohns in the UK) to make wine, with a pre-made kit and prepackaged herbs this book covers it in detail. For anything more advanced – different fruits, making juice, using your own fruit, managing yeasts, or fortifying the wine – that is not covered.

I would say that this book should be useful for beginners, as it offers a very soft start to wine-making, but calling it the ultimate guide is over-reaching.

As wine-making is a popular activity in this part of the area – there’s a vineyard down the road, plenty of hobbyists, and most of the farms make their own – I did ask a more experienced winemaker for his opinion, and he suspected that most of what the book covers will actually be in the instructions for the concentrate and wine-making kits that you can buy.

Although the formatting is good there are spelling and grammar errors throughout, including skipped apostrophes and some odd phrasing. As this is a Canadian book I give it a pass on the non-British phrasing, but sadly that does not answer the three main issues with the book: covering only concentrate, not covering fruit and wine sources other than grapes, and the grammar issues.

Unfortunately that does lower my rating to a 3, as a beginner’s guide only.