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RHUBARB WINE (another way) (To forty pounds of freshly-cut)
To forty pounds of freshly-cut juicy rhubarb-stalks, sliced but not peeled, put ten gallons of cold soft water, and let them steep two days, closely covered up. Take off the scum, press the juice out of the fruit, strain the liquor through a sieve, and put it to twenty-five pounds of good loaf sugar roughly broken. Stir it well for twenty minutes, and when the sugar is dissolved fill your cask, put on the bung lightly, or cover with a tile, and when it has ceased fermenting, add to it three pints of white French brandy, and half a pound of white sugar-candy. Then stop it up well with paper pasted over the bung and sand upon that; leave the vent-peg out a day or two only. Let the liquor stand two or three months, then rack it off. Filter the lees perfectly clear, and return all into the cask again, adding the thin yellow rinds of four Seville oranges, and six ounces of the best barley-sugar, dissolved with an ounce of isinglass in two quarts of the wine. Then stop up the cask again as before, and let it remain a year in a cool cellar; you may then bottle the wine, using the best corks, fastening them with wire; seal with green wax, and when it has been kept nine months longer it will be excellent.
A full Victorian country-wine recipe, written for a ten-gallon cask in a cool cellar. It works on modern equipment, but the scale, the fining agents and the reliance on wild yeast all need translating.
- Scale it down by tenForty pounds of rhubarb to ten gallons of water is roughly 18 kg to 45 litres. At one-tenth: 4 lb rhubarb, 1 gallon (4.5 L) water, 2 lb 8 oz sugar, and 6 fl oz brandy.
- Stalks only, alwaysThe recipe is explicit that you slice the stalks unpeeled. Rhubarb leaves carry far higher levels of oxalic acid and must never go into the steep, nor should the pink stalk skins be swapped for leaf trimmings.
- Soft water"Soft water" means low in dissolved calcium — rainwater in a Victorian household. Filtered or bottled low-mineral water does the same job; hard tap water will throw more calcium oxalate haze.
- The two-day cold steep is the hingeRhubarb is not boiled here, which is why the wine keeps its fresh acidity. Keep it cold and closely covered as directed, and take off the scum before pressing; a much longer steep risks souring.
- Wild fermentation versus a pitched yeastNo yeast is named in this recipe, so an ambient fermentation seems to be assumed. Modern winemakers pitch a cultured wine yeast and add a nutrient, since rhubarb must is short on nitrogen and can stick partway through otherwise.
- A tile is not an airlock"Bung lightly, or cover with a tile" invites acetic bacteria. Ferment under an airlock, and take the same care at the two rackings — this wine spends well over a year in cask in the original.
- Loaf sugar, sugar-candy, barley-sugarLoaf sugar was refined cane in a cone, broken up with nippers; ordinary granulated sugar is its direct replacement. Sugar-candy and barley-sugar are both simply crystallised or cooked sugar, added late to sweeten and to feed a slow secondary — plain sugar covers both.
- IsinglassA collagen fining from sturgeon swim bladders, sold now mainly for beer. Any modern fining agent (bentonite, or a gelatin or vegan alternative) does the clearing, dissolved in a little of the wine as directed.
- Seville orangesThe bitter marmalade orange, in season only in late winter. It is here for aromatic peel oil and bitterness, not juice; pare the yellow zest thinly with no white pith, which would turn the wine harsh.
- The timetableTwo to three months to the first racking, a year in cask, then nine months in bottle — around two years before it is drunk. Wire the corks and seal them as instructed; a still wine that has taken up a little residual sugar can restart in the bottle.
Cassell's includes rhubarb wine among a long run of "English wines" made from garden produce. Rhubarb suited the purpose unusually well: it was cheap and vigorously productive in a British garden. The elaborate finishing here — brandy, isinglass, barley-sugar, pasted paper and sand over the bung, green wax on the corks — shows the recipe aiming at something more than a rough cellar drink. It also shows a period reality: with no reliable way to exclude air or measure fermentation, the defences were physical seals and long, patient ageing.