Home › The Principles of Cookery › RHUBARB WINE (another way) (Cut five pounds of rhubarb)
RHUBARB WINE (another way) (Cut five pounds of rhubarb)
Cut five pounds of rhubarb into short lengths, bruise it, and put it into a bowl with a gallon of cold water. Let it stand for five days, and stir it twice a day. Strain off the liquor, and add to it four pounds of loaf sugar. When this is dissolved add the rind of a lemon and half an ounce of isinglass. Let the liquor remain for four or five days, until the fermentation begins to subside. Skim the crust from the surface, draw off the wine, put it into a cask, and in a fortnight bung it down. It will be ready for bottling in six months. If the wine ferment after it is put into the cask, it should be drawn off into another one. The addition of a little currant juice will improve the colour.
A Victorian country wine of the simplest kind: cold-water extraction of rhubarb, heavily sugared and left to whatever yeast happens to be in the room. It works, but almost every piece of equipment named has a better modern equivalent.
- Stalks onlyUse the pink and green stalks and nothing else. Rhubarb leaves carry high levels of oxalic acid and related compounds and are not food; trim and discard them before the fruit goes anywhere near the bowl.
- Wild fermentationThe recipe relies on whatever ambient yeast is present; the five days of stirring are for cold extraction of the juice, not a wait for fermentation to start. A sachet of dried wine yeast and a teaspoon of yeast nutrient, pitched after straining, gives a faster, cleaner and more predictable ferment.
- Loaf sugarLoaf sugar was refined white sugar sold in a cone and broken up as needed; ordinary granulated sugar stands in for it. Four pounds to a gallon of must is a great deal of sugar -- more than an ambient ferment is likely to convert -- so expect a strong, sweet wine that stalls somewhere short of its potential; three pounds gives something lighter and drier.
- IsinglassA fining agent made from the swim bladders of sturgeon, used to clear cloudy liquor. Half an ounce is a lot by modern standards, and adding it at the start rather than at the end is odd; contemporary practice is to fine only after fermentation has finished, with bentonite or a proprietary finings if you want a vegetarian option.
- The bung is the hazardBunging down a cask after a fortnight assumes fermentation is over. If it is not, the vessel is under pressure. Use a demijohn with an airlock instead, and only seal or bottle when a hydrometer reads steady over several days.
- Racking"Draw off" and "into another one" both mean racking: siphoning the clear wine off the sediment, leaving the lees behind. Do it two or three times over the six months rather than only when trouble appears.
- SanitationThe one thing the original never mentions. Every bowl, siphon, jar and bottle should be sanitised before contact; a wild ferment left open for days is otherwise as likely to turn to vinegar as to wine.
- YieldRoughly a gallon and a quarter of finished wine, or about seven standard bottles. Six months is a minimum; rhubarb wine is usually thin and sharp before its first year.
- ColourThe currant juice is cosmetic. Rhubarb loses almost all its pink in fermentation and finishes straw-coloured; a few ounces of red currant or blackcurrant juice restores a blush without changing the flavour much.
Rhubarb belongs to the great Victorian family of "English wines" or "country wines" made from garden produce rather than grapes: cowslip, dandelion, elderflower, parsnip, gooseberry. Rhubarb suited the purpose because it was hardy, wildly productive, and free once a crown was established, and it came in early in the year when little else did. Cassell's gives several rhubarb wine methods -- this one is headed "another way" -- and the process needs no fruit worth eating and little equipment beyond a bowl, a strainer and a small cask. Isinglass was the standard fining agent of the period for clearing cloudy liquor.