Sometime, when it comes to book-buying, I just can't help myself. And at $1 ...even if it is a bit water stained......how can you go wrong? Well, the truth is I have frequently gone wrong buying cheap books and rued my impulsiveness. But not really in this case. In my youth, I lived and worked in the heart of Australia's wine growing area .....The Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area....and was even a member of the Griffith Oenological Society (A self styled group of wine lovers or connoisseurs who were scientists from the CSIRO and the Viticultural Research Station). I would never claim to be a "known palate" or even a wine connoisseur ...or, these days, even much of a wine drinker......but the whole drama of wine ...from the growing of the grapes through to the making of the wine and then the marketing and the consumption has always interested me. One of my good friends from those early days has gone on to be an internationally famous viticultural consultant and I've followed his career and interests at a distance. I've even helped in the harvesting of friend's grapes and pruning of the vines. So much of what Jeff Cox covers in his book is not new to me.
He really does a workman like job of covering all the basics from selection of varieties, and matching with the site through to laying out the trellising and making your own vintage.
If it has a fault, from my perspective, it is that the book is clearly focussed on the North American market and little consideration is given to other areas of the world where vines are grown. Still, he doesn't pretend to be writing for everyone and I still learned a lot about pruning ....which is both an art and a science. I did notice that he didn't mention the Scott-Henry system of vine trellising which my learned friend Richard has long promoted as a way of improving both yields and quality. But he did cover other systems of trellis. I missed some section about the history of wine but I guess there are whole books written just about this subject so that's not a reasonable criticism.
Overall, I quite enjoyed the book even with its US focus. Three stars from me. ( )

I'm interested in possibly putting in a few vines of grapes to produce my own wine from scratch, instead of from juice. From Vines to Wines is a book to read if you own a lot of land and are interested in putting in a bunch of vines. I wound up skipping the first parts of this book just because I found them to be terribly unhelpful for a small-scale, grape growing newbie.

Wine is something that can be enjoyed by anybody, regardless of one's ability to afford wines that cost in the triple digits. I've tasted some mighty delicious wines under 10 bucks. I feel like Cox does not agree with me, as he comes across as very pretentious early on in this book. He uses a lot of terminology (that he doesn't define) that is probably not familiar to some amateur wine makers or wine drinkers, and I found that to be a bit alienating.

I did find the last part of this book to be the most helpful as I picked up some tips and tricks for my own wine making experiments. While I still don't know if it's worth it to try to vine some of my own grapes, at least I have a better feel for making the finished product. ( )