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Rhubarb Wine
Put twenty-five large stalks of rhubarb in the bottom of a tub, pound and mash with a potato masher. Add ten gallons of cold water, let it stand twenty-four hours, then add fifteen pounds of brown sugar. Stir until the sugar is dissolved. Add one cup of brewers' yeast or two compressed yeast cakes dissolved in a cup of warm water. Strain in a cask, let stand over night, then rack off again. Bottle and put in a cold place.
A big, old-fashioned country wine scaled for a wash-tub. The quantities are generous and the instructions compress weeks of fermentation into a few lines, so read the timing points before starting.
- Scale firstTen gallons of must is roughly 38 litres if American gallons are meant, nearer 45 if imperial, and will need a food-grade fermenter, not a wooden tub. The whole thing divides cleanly by ten for a one-gallon test batch: 2–3 large stalks, 1 gallon water, 1.5 lb brown sugar.
- Leaves are not optional to removeOnly the stalks go in. Rhubarb leaves carry high levels of oxalic acid and related compounds and must be cut off and discarded before pounding.
- "Twenty-five large stalks" is vagueRhubarb stalks vary enormously. Reckon on perhaps 8–10 lb of trimmed stalk for the full ten gallons.
- The yeastBrewers' yeast is a beer strain and will generally not ferment as far or as cleanly as a wine strain; the two compressed cakes are fresh baker's yeast, which throws bready flavours. A dry wine yeast at the rate on the sachet is the modern equivalent.
- Do not bottle overnightThis is the hinge of the recipe, and where it fails as written. A must with fifteen pounds of sugar in it has barely started fermenting after one night; sealed in glass it will keep producing carbon dioxide and burst the bottles. Ferment under an airlock until the bubbling has genuinely stopped, which takes weeks, not hours.
- RackingTo "rack off" is to siphon the clear liquid off the sediment into a clean vessel, leaving the lees behind. Expect to do this two or three times over a couple of months as the wine clears.
- Oxalic acid in the stalksRhubarb wine is sometimes treated with a little precipitated chalk to knock back the sharp oxalic edge.
- YieldTen gallons is about fifty 750 ml bottles. The "cold place" matters: rhubarb wine is thin and fresh when young and benefits from six months to a year in a cool cellar.
Rhubarb reached English and American gardens as a medicinal plant long before it was eaten, and by the nineteenth century it was the first thing a kitchen garden produced in spring — cheap, abundant, and prone to gluts. That is why a wine recipe turns up at all: country winemaking was a preserving technique as much as a pleasure, a way of turning a surplus of fruit, flowers or roots into something that would keep. Rhubarb wine belongs to the same household tradition as dandelion, parsnip and elderberry wines, all built on the same template of sugar, water, yeast and whatever the garden had too much of. Its sharpness comes from malic and oxalic acids, and a good batch gives a pale, brisk, faintly sparkling result.