Yes, my most famous booklet full of erudite and scholarly advice on how to make high-class homemade wine cheaply, easily and QUICKLY has been republished as an e-book. And it’s free!
Okay, the booklet may not be all those things – famous, erudite, scholarly – but it is now available as a MOBI (Kindle), EPUB (iPad) or PDF file from http://www.smashwords.com and it is free. Enter “Quickie Table Wines” in Smashwords’ search engine to find and download the booklet.
Here’s the summary:
In 1977, I published a small 16-page booklet titled “Quickie Table Wines”. It was a simple “do this, do that” set of instructions designed to produce palatable fruit-based table wines within 4 to 5 weeks for just £0.15/bottle. The technique had been well researched and proven by experiment and the booklet went on to become a UK best seller, selling just under 12,000 copies before publication ceased sometime around the mid-‘80s. Friends and family still talk about the booklet and their wine-making experiences and I have decided to re-publish as an e-book. The prices in the booklet are 1977 prices but the technique is ageless. Enjoy.
Find more details here.
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Ben's Blogs, Books & Pix 
Many a sore head because of your quickie wines. Had to stop making it in the end. Too many hangovers.
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San, I can only be held responsible for the high quality of what you drank, not the high quantity!
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Me as well, I was only nine at the time!
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I recently unearthed my original copy. It is dog-eared, wine-stained and even signed by the author. What’s it worth? Should I auction or will the value appreciate following this re-publication?? Like San, we had many hangovers and finally gave up following an ‘explosion’!! Certainly a ‘blast from the past’ though and it was all good fun all those years ago!!
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A couple of years back, I found a copy of the QTW booklet for sale on eBay. The asking price was $48, around £32. There was no mention of the book being signed so I assumed not. If I were you, I would place your signed copy on eBay and fly a kite – say $100?
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Yes I also have an original copy. I secretly decanted some Guava wine from Ben’s recipes into two old bottles of Chablis re-corked them and gave them to a friend who claimed to be an expert in wine and declared that it was one of the finest wines he had ever tasted
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Guava wine was the biggest surprise to me. In the early days of experimentation, I bought a tin of every tinned fruit in the local supermarket, including guava, and made a gallon of wine from each. The guavas in the tin were pink in colour but the final wine turned out to be white and with a very delicate bouquet and flavour. I used sultanas rather than raisins so as not to influence the colour of the wine and fermented it out bone dry.
Guava wine became one of my favourite white wines, eminently drinkable both as an aperitif and a post-prandial.
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