Is there a good beginner's wine book?

Looking for something along the lines of "How to Brew" but for wine.

SWMBO is making her first wine kit when she gets back, we want to do some reading first.

Do like I did and buy a quality kit. The instructions were very easy to follow and you already have most of the equipment. Depending on the type of wine, you may need a large 8 gallon or so plastic fermenter. I did mine in a 6 1/2 gallon carboy and didn't have any problems. You might also need a couple 6 gallon carboys if you don't already have them. The wine needs to be racked to a secondary and you don't want much head space. The one think I would recommend is a degasser that you can hook up to a drill. It works slick.

As far as books? I haven't found one yet. I purchased The Joy of Home Wine Making but I'm not too impressed with it. It's a lot like Charlie P's book but it mainly goes into making wines other than grape.
I wouldn't mind getting my hands on a good wine making book as well.

I had the same question:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=12642

The Jack Keller link is awesome. Hard to navigate at first, but freaking fantastic.

I second the Jack Keller comment. I also think that because good wine is mostly a product of the best ingredients, grape wine is difficult for the home vinter. Country wines like blackberry, rhubarb, and dandelion, however, are much easier for us to get quality ingredients for. This is one reason why Jack keller's site is so great; it has recipes for every imaginable type of wine with clear directions and a description of taste.

Chairman Cheyco said:

I had the same question:

https://www.homebrewtalk.com/showthread.php?t=12642

The Jack Keller link is awesome. Hard to navigate at first, but freaking fantastic.

Click to expand...

Sweet! Thanks!

This guy has a pretty decent tutorial for making your first kit wine, your SWMBO may find it helpful to take any intimidation out of their first time:
http://www.finevinewines.com//Wiz/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=1136

This one's not bad either, different type of kit, less photos, and not as "cute" as the first one, but worth checking out:
http://www.winepress.us/forums/index.php?showtopic=1011

Good luck! My first kit is clarifying now (stirred up lees and added sorbate and isinglass last weekend) - I think it's pretty darn clear now, supposed to bottle it in a week.
Since the directions said not to rack before clarifying, and next step is bottling, I guess I am wondering if I should rack the wine off this sediment and let it settle another couple of days before bottling, or if I should minimize handling and just try to bottle straight from the current carboy without stirring up the sediment...
At any rate, this is kind of fun, and SWMBO enjoyed being part of it, she was also happy not to smell any boiling wort, although the smell coming from the bucket during primary fermentation of the must was pretty pungeant!

I recommend Step by Step Home winemaking by John Iverson. It is pretty detailed and starts simple and moves up from there. Covers a lot of different aspects of making wine from grapes....not so much on kits. But reading it will give you a better idea of what is going on with a kit so you can tweak your process rather than blindly following the instructions.