Wine Maker Magazine

About Wine Maker Magazine

This bi-monthly magazine started about a decade ago and is now the number one magazine for home wine makers. If you want to dabble in making home brewed beer, check out Wine Maker's sister magazine, Brew Your Own. For those who are not yet wine making enthusiasts and want to see what it's all about before investing any time, energy or money into the hobby, they can always check out the website winemakermag.com

Getting Help with Wine Making

Given that wine has basically one major ingredient, grape juice, you would think that it's relatively simple to make. Certainly much more simple than brewing your own beer, which involves barley, hops, making mashes and so on. Well, not so fast there, speedy. If wine was easy to make, commercial vitners wouldn't charge so much for a great bottle of wine. With wine, you need to carefully tend to the grapes, harvest at the right time and then, there's the unpredictability (a 50% chance of rain is not a prediction, it's a guess) of weather. Then there's the fermentation process, siphoning off the lees and the bottling. Even a seasoned home wine making expert could use a little help sometimes. Sure, books and DVD's help, but Wine Maker offers the latest, up to date information on the wine making process and trends in wine making.

What the Magazine Covers

Here are some various topics the magazine covers:

• Tips for using hybrid grapes
• Wine making myths
• About wine making supplies
• Proper pruning techniques
• A sulfite calculator
• Helpful hints when trying to balance acid structure and pH levels
• A few words about oxidation
• Explaining Malo-lactic fermentation
• Finding the right kind of barrel
• Building your own wine barrels
• Tips on making your own special blended wines
• Bottling basics
• Proper filtration techniques
• How to make cherry wine
• Making Dandelion wine
• How to calibrate your wine making tools
• Learning how to make big, muscular wines
• Tips for backyard vineyards
• Lessons about Terroir (okay, fancy word for the dirt in your backyard grape garden)
• Everything you need to know about sulfites

Enter a Contest

Once you have your luscious hand crafted wine (sounds better than homemade, huh?) bottled and aged, see what other home winemakers think by entering it in the Wine Maker International Amateur Wine Making Competition. This is the largest amateur wine competition in the world and in 2008, Wine Maker received over 4,000 entries.

The judging for the competition takes place toward the end of April and the winner is announced at the magazine's annual conference that takes place in the middle of May. The Wine Maker International Amateur Wine Making Competition offers hundreds of categories in which wine makers compete, offering multiple gold, silver and bronze medals in each category. There are 10 grand prize categories:

• Best of Show Red
• Best of Show White
• Best of Show Country Fruit
• Best of Show Mead
• Best of Show Kit/Concentrate - Wines made from kits or concentrates are judged separately than those made from fresh grapes.
• Winemakers of the Year
• Retailer of the Year
• Best of Show Dessert wines
• Best of Show Sparkling wines
• Wine Club of the Year

Wine Maker also holds an annual Wine Maker Label Contest for home vitners.

Everything You Ever Need to Know

The magazine subscription price of around $25 USD per year is small compared to the vast amounts of helpful hints, tips and information it offers about home winemaking. Keeping up to date on the latest trends in wine making helps you to expand the number of varietals you can experiment with making. The world of wine tasting is, after all, all about exploring -- and the same goes for wine making.