One of the essential ingredients to successful home winemaking is knowledge. Information in the form of recipes, the experiences of others and their ideas on winemaking can all play a significant role in your ability to develop into an accomplished winemaker.

One great site where you can gain some of these insights is

winemakingtalk.com. Very simply, it is a message forum for winemakers. It's a place where you can: ask questions, get your questions answered, or just read through the various threads of conversation they've accumulated over the last couple of years.

The site is growing at a very fast pace. At last check it had over 1,700 contributors with over 4,000 posts.

If you want to ask a question or maybe you happen to know the answer to someone else's question, you can sign-up as a member and start participating. It's very simple to do, and even though we have no affiliation with this site, we highly recommend participating. Even if you don't want to sign-up right now, you can still visit and read through the conversations, a valuable experience in itself.

The Wine Lover's Page has always been our favorite website for keeping up with the wine trends of the day. Their finger always seems to be on the pulse of what's really going on in the wine community. One of their site's strengths is it's no-nonsense approach to keeping up with and explaining the relevant. You won't find any fluffy articles that talk down to the reader. Big words are

not used as "braggary" but only when necessary, and their tone is down-to-earth. As they like to put it, their web site is in the "no-snob zone".

One of the features on the site is their "Online Wine Tasting Course" where you can "Learn To Taste Like An Expert". I mention this because I found the course to be perfect as an introduction to wine appreciation and wine tasting. It will take the intimidation right out of you.

It's basically a series of 13 short chapters that walks you through the fundamentals of tasting, as well as give you a brief overview of the various different styles of wine. And here's the best part, it's free! You don't even need to sign-up. Just go to their web site and go through it at your own leisure.

GOOGLE GROUPS
The amount of information on the internet today is astonishing. It's getting to the point that you would be hard pressed not to find an answer to your question or a fulfillment to your curiosity just by doing just a bit of typing.

This has been a liberating revelation for home winemakers. In the past, a source for information was always the one thing lacking within the hobby. If you had a question, you could ask your supplier or thumb through the two or three books you had picked up. If the answer wasn't there you'd end up scratching your head--at a total loss as to what to do next.

One great resource on the internet is Google groups. Google has set up an incredible number of groups that act as forums for individuals to either contribute to or learn from that cover different topics from computers to home health. One of these groups is "Winemaking". They currently have over 600 members and are continually discussing a variety of topics surrounding home winemaking.

While becoming a member and posting your own questions is strongly encouraged, one does not have to become a member just to simply read through all the valuable posts. You can even do a search through the postings to find information on a specific subject such as "bottling" or "wine yeasts."

We just added a new section to this blog. It's the "Favorite Websites" section which list some of our favorite wine making websites. You can find this section in the column on the right of this page--just below the "Month" section.

Some of our "favorites" are informational sites; some are wine appreciations sites; and some are just too interesting not to be included in the list. "Drink The Vine" is one of the sites that fits into all three categories. It covers a broad range of topics surrounding wine, everything from commercially made wines to articles about home winemakers.

And, if you are looking for wine recipes, "Jack Keller Winemaking" has a huge archive of recipes from the common to the hard-to-find. He also has a tremendous amount of information in the way articles.

We'll be adding to this list as more sites become our favorites.

The age of the internet is just amazing to me. Just the ease with which information flows today fills me with astonishment. This is coming from someone who remembers getting up to change the channel on the television in BC [before cable]. Thanks to services such a Google, YouTube and many others, we can all learn more about, and enjoy, our favorite hobbies.

Here are a couple of videos I found on the internet that show a couple of various perspectives on the art and science of making wine.

As time goes on, I intend to keep an eye out for more videos on wine making that are worth of attention. I'll bring them to you here as they become available. You may also want to keep up on it on your own. Just go to youtube.com and type in "wine making" in the search field.

If you have not heard of Jack Keller you may want to get acquainted, particularly with his web site. Over the last few years Jack has been compiling an extraordinary amount of information, all geared for the home wine maker. The recipes and other wine making info is endless.

http://winemaking.jackkeller.net