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 Here's a tip when using search engines on the Internet: Instead of typing in "Home winemaking," type in "Home and winemaking." Search engines treat each word as a separate entity and will give you matches for each one independent of the other. Example, when I recently did a search on Home and winemaking I got Sites 1 - 10 of 23,323,098. That represents the first ten are visible out of 23 million matches. Can you believe that? Fortunately the first few hundred thousand had to do with wine. I suppose if I had scrolled long enough I could have gotten building plans for a straw house in Arizona...that would have been the far end of the "home" part. I've also learned that the popular search engines, Yahoo, Lycos, Webcrawler, Excite, etc., will each give a different response, i.e. sites 1 - 10 of 1,017 or sites 1 - 10 of 321,998, and then the first 50 listed may be a repeat of the one above it, like you'll find when you first run across www.smartwine.com, but none of the engines seem to have an organized sense of priority. Recommendation: use different search engines to find the same information on the same subject, whatever it may be. I wasn't intimidated by the prospect of scrolling through 23 million matches so proceeded to look at those that appeared most interesting. The very first one, "Internet Winemaking Resources," could not be found. Nor could about 20% of the others I clicked on, which included some pointing to the U.C. Davis site, one of the best on the Internet, as pointed out later.
 I hit home winemaking paydirt when I came across http://www.hookup.net/~cybercom/betterwine/ whose first sentence was "It's nice to hit a home run, the first time at bat!" I could understand how they could feel that way. While visiting I was reading an in-depth wine and health article and captured the following: "The simple answer is that if every adult North American drank two glasses of wine each day, cardiovascular disease, which accounts for almost 50% of deaths in this population, would be cut by 40% and $40 billion could be saved annually." Yes! Yes! Yes! Now if we can only get the feds and the likes of Florida, Kentucky, and a few other Fascist states to acknowledge those health benefits we could reduce this country's negative cash flow significantly. Hmmm, appears whatever the Curmudgeon has is catching. Another captivating article was entitled "Winemaking is for men?" You know I had to read that as well. It isn't so, according to Susan Kazan, the author and proprietor of Wine Not in Toronto. This site also included a Beet Wine Recipe: 3 lbs. unpeeled beets, 1 gallon water, 3 lbs. sugar, there's more, and: Rice and Raisin Wine: .5 kilos raisins, .25 kilos long grain rice, 4.5 kilos sugar (if you are stuck for yeast nutrient, try Vitamin B1), etc. No bombs, bare-breasts, or thrilling action scenes. JW says check it out. The best site I came across on this trip was this one published by U.C. Davis at http://wineserver.ucdavis.edu/. Check in here and you'll be busy for the next four years. A masterpiece of wine resources. Another great site is located at http://www.winevin.com/wine.html which purports to be the World Wine Encyclopedia. From what I saw it's legit. Extensive reviews of the world by wine region, type of wines grown and includes maps. Pretty impressive. And, of course, for all of us who needs, or should I say, wants, updated information governing direct shipment regulations for each state, you can go directly to http://www.winelaw.org/ and click on the state in question. Published by Wine Institute and very easy to follow. Did I mention that back issues of The Wine Trader and of course The Online Report along with lots of other good wine information, can be found at our favorite site: www.wines.com
The Wine Curmudgeon © Copyright 1997 Jerry D, Mead, JDM Enterprises and Wine Investigation for Novices and Oenophiles; all rights reserved.
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