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Rhubarb Wine
Take fifty pounds of rhubarb, wipe it with a wet cloth, and bruise it well. The easiest way of doing this is to lay it on a clean table, and crush it with a flat-iron. Put it into a tub or bowl, and pour over it ten gallons of cold water; let it remain nine days, stirring two or three times a day. Strain off the liquor, and to each gallon put three pounds of loaf sugar, the juice of a lemon, and half of the rind. Put it in the cask with two ounces of isinglass, and leave it unstopped for a month, then bung it up, and let it stand in a very cool but not damp place for twelve months, when it will be ready for bottling. A little brandy may be added to the wine, if liked, but it is quite unnecessary. The middle of May is the best time for making rhubarb wine, as the fruit is then full of sap. Time, six weeks to prepare. Probable cost, varying with the price of the rhubarb. A quantity of rhubarb at this time of the year ought to be got for very little. Sufficient for about eighteen gallons of wine.
A country wine on a farmhouse scale: fifty pounds of rhubarb and eighteen gallons of finished wine. Everything here works, but the quantities, the vessels and the reliance on wild yeast all need translating before you start.
- Stalks only, leaves discardedThe recipe says only "rhubarb", assuming a reader who knows the leaf is not food. Rhubarb leaves are high in oxalic acid and must be cut off and thrown away; only the pink and green stalks go into the tub.
- Scale and unitsThese are imperial gallons of about 4.55 litres, so ten gallons is roughly 45 litres of water over about 23 kg of rhubarb. For a manageable modern batch, take a tenth of the rhubarb and water -- 5 lb rhubarb, 1 gallon water -- and then apply the recipe's own rule of 3 lb sugar, the juice of a lemon and half the rind to each gallon of strained liquor, which will be more than the gallon of water you started with.
- No yeast is namedThis is the hinge. A nine-day open steep was expected to catch airborne and fruit-skin yeasts, which is why it works some years and turns to vinegar in others. Any current winemaking recipe pitches a measured wine yeast and a nutrient, because rhubarb juice is acidic and poor in the nitrogen yeast needs.
- Loaf sugarLoaf or lump sugar was refined cane sugar broken from a cone. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the same thing and dissolves faster; dissolve it in a little of the warmed liquor rather than tipping it in dry.
- IsinglassA fining agent made from the swim bladders of fish, once sold in sheets or shreds. Two ounces to eighteen gallons is a clearing dose, not a fermentation aid. Modern equivalents are gelatine, bentonite or kieselsol; a wine left long enough will usually drop clear on its own.
- "Leave it unstopped for a month"This is the vigorous fermentation, and the cask is left open so gas can escape. An airlock does the same job while keeping out vinegar flies and airborne spoilage organisms, which is the one substantive improvement on the method.
- Cask, and the cool placeA cask of this size is not a modern kitchen item; glass demijohns or food-grade fermenters filled nearly to the neck work better, since air space in a part-full vessel oxidises the wine. "Very cool but not damp" points to a steady cellar temperature, dark and away from swings -- something in the region of 10-15C.
- Timing and the twelve monthsThe "time, six weeks to prepare" covers only the steeping and the initial ferment; the wine genuinely wants the full year before bottling, and it will be harsh and thin if opened early. Mid-May is sound advice: field rhubarb then is juicy and full-flavoured without the woodiness of late summer stalks.
- YieldAbout eighteen imperial gallons, roughly 82 litres, or some 109 bottles of 75 cl. A tenth-scale batch works out at about 8 litres, roughly eleven bottles.
Rhubarb reached British gardens as a medicinal root long before it was eaten, and only became a common kitchen plant in the first half of the nineteenth century, once forcing and cheap sugar made the sour stalks palatable. By the time Cassell's dictionary appeared it was the archetypal cottage-garden glut crop, and country wine was the obvious way to use a surplus that could not be sold or stored. Books of this period carry dozens of such recipes parsnip, cowslip, elderberry, gooseberry, rhubarb made in a tub and a cask by householders with no access to grapes and a heavy duty on imported wine. Rhubarb wine was often said to resemble a light white or even, when bottled with a little residual sugar, a sparkling wine a comparison best treated as ambition rather than description.