Publications / Complete Catalogue / Ben's Adventures in Wine Making

Reviews

Carol Dance - Nov 9 2011 5:42PM

This book is a joy! It's not only a marvellous 'how to' book, but also an extraordinarily funny 'how NOT to' book! Mr Hardy is a home-made wine enthusiast (drinker as well as maker!). His book is filled with recipes, hints/tips and stories of his triumphs and failures along the way. It is a joyously funny read whether you are a home-made wine brewer or not. I'm buying one for myself and another for my sister for christmas. A super book!

Thge Leeds Guide - Nov 16 2011 12:34PM

Homebrewing beer and wine are becoming increasingly popular hobbies these days. Once a common enough practice for those wanting to pinch the pennies and keep themselves steadily trollied, a new generation of makers are embracing homebrew as a way to craft drinks to suit their own palates and, yep, save a bob or two while they’re at it. Ben Hardy, a columnist for Home Farmer magazine and lawyer who lives and works in Leeds, has taken home winemaking to quite an extreme. His recently released book, Ben’s Adventures in Winemaking, documents his attempts to make 33 different wines using a range of unlikely ingredients – prune and parsnip, nettle, banana and exotic tinned fruit, among others. The book is written in diary form, and divided up wine-by-wine. Each wine comes with basic instructions, details on where Ben sourced his ingredients from (Loiners will enjoy a host of recognisable names here) and then a bottle-by-bottle account of both Ben’s reaction to the wine and that of the friends and family he forces it upon. The results, he admits, are variable. He says of his pumpkin wine that, other than mulling it, its only use is "for cleaning drains", while his peach and banana wine leaves him "pleased and smug". It’s clearly one for homebrew fans, primarily – some fine wine enthusiasts might not class Ben’s none-vine drinks as true wine – and the details of the gravity of the drink and how the bottles have fermented are certainly the domain of brewers only. It’s not just about homebrewed plonk though: Ben’s quirky diary includes social engagements he attends, small digressions into his thoughts on life and regular mentions of his reading for book group, as well as the situations in which he drinks the bottles. Anyone planning on making their own wine may well find this an entertaining and illuminating tool

Susan Whitehouse - Nov 20 2011 7:43PM

This book is an extremely enjoyable account of a few years in the life of Ben Hardy, and his family and friends, as he experiments with making and drinking different types of wine. I'm not a home brewer myself, but I still found this book both interesting and very funny. I imagine that for someone starting to make their own wine it would also be extremely useful.

Simon Betterman - Dec 8 2011 12:41PM

This book is a joy to read, and so much more than just the highly entertaining accounts of how wine is made from a startlingly wide variety of fruits. It's also an insight into Ben's very full life through snapshots based around his extraordinary wine making (and wine drinking) abilities. We jump back and forth in time as we follow the process of one particular wine, from getting the fruit to opening the last bottle of the batch. A bottle of Blackberry was drunk to commiserate his wife being made redundant, yet a few months later another Blackberry was opened when his wife arrived home late from work. Reinstated? New job? Ah the intrigue! I feel sure another bottle, maybe a Gooseberry or a Plum, will be uncorked at some point in the book in celebration of his wife returning to work and I'll have the answer to my question. So, in short, delightful.