About the Fruit Winemaking Quarterly
The Fruit Winemaking Quarterly was published quarterly for over 14 years by fruit winemaker Dan Archibald. It was a newsletter dedicated to the art and science of making wine from fruits other than grapes.
Issues of the newsletter provided information about how to make wine from a wide variety of fruits, including Apples, Pears, Rhubarb, Citrus, Blackberries, Huckleberries, Elderberries, Peaches, Apricots, Cranberries, Plums, Strawberries, Pineapples and many more types of fruits. In his issues, Dan interviewed other winemakers, provided lots of tips, and explored the folklore surrounding fruit and fruit wines.
Sadly, Dan passed away in 2005 and the Fruit Winemaking Quarterly is no longer being published.
Aside from publishing the Fruit Winemaking Quarterly, Dan Archibald was a winemaker and commercial grower. He converted apples, pears, plums, and berries, grown on his property in Sebastopol, CA into award winning wines. Additionally, he judged the commercial fruit wine division at the Indy International wine competition in Indianapolis, and amateur wines at the Orange County Fair, Marin County Fair and the Sonoma County Harvest Fair. From a conversation with other judges about the lack of knowledge on how to judge fruit wines, sprung the idea for a newsletter dedicated to the art and hobby of fruit winemaking.
For over 7 years I worked with Dan, maintaining his website which was piggybacked off one of my web design company’s domain names, www.virtualcommunity.com. Even though Dan’s website has been offline since he passed away, I still see people come through in my logfiles from time to time, looking for it and for information about fruit winemaking. I thought rather than seeing a “page not found” message, that putting this page up would be a good way to let people know what happened to the newsletter.
To honor Dan and the efforts he put into the Fruit Winemaking Quarterly, I’d be happy to post any fruit winemaking recipes or tips here that anybody would like to share with others that arrive here looking for fruit winemaking information.
If you have something you’d like to share here to help other fruit winemakers, please let us know and we’ll see that it gets posted here.
If you send something, please let me know how I should identify your submission on the website (name, nickname, anonymous, etc).