Making wine from rhubarb

Rhubarb is strange stuff. Technically it's a vegetable but it's usually cooked with piles of sugar and served as a fruit. Why does this work with rhubarb and not with, say, spinach or broccoli? Because, unlike most vegetables, rhubarb is high in acid. We enjoy fruits for their balance of sweet and sour, sugar and acid. Only, there's a catch. The acids in real fruits are malic, citric and tartaric. Rhubarb contains mainly oxalic acid which is poisonous. Fortunately, the highest concentration of oxalic acid in rhubarb is in the leaves. The stalks are perfectly safe to eat, raw or cooked, in normal quantities. This should come as no surprise. We've been eating the stuff for centuries. 

Ingredients for 5 litres:

• 2kg rhubarb stalks (no leaves!)
• 2 large ripe bananas
• 1 litre supermarket apple juice (no preservatives!)
• 800 grams granulated sugar
• Cold water, to 5 litres total

Method:

Prepare a yeast starter using a small quantity of chopped rhubarb, some apple juice and some dried wine yeast. Leave it overnight.

Chop the rhubarb into wee bits.

Chop the bananas into slices without peeling them.

Put all the fruit, juice and half the sugar into the fermenting bin

Add water enough to cover/float the fruit.

Add the yeast starter and ferment on the pulp for three days

Strain into a 5-litre fermenting vessel

Add the rest of the sugar in water

Ferment to dryness, etc. . .

Note:

Because of the bananas, this wine will froth up impressively. Don't be in a hurry to fill the fermenting jar before it has calmed down. Why add bananas? To achieve better balance. Rhubarb is high acid low sugar, bananas are high sugar low acid. They also add body. Rhubarb alone would be 'thin'.

Beer, Wine or Cider?

Let's suppose you are a complete beginner. You've decided you would like to make your own plonk but you're not sure where to start. Well, there are several good reasons for starting off by making a batch of cider. Here's a table that illustrates the main points:

	Beer	Wine	Cider
Skill level	quite high	moderate	almost none
Processes	several	several	very few
Success?	quite high	high	guaranteed
Equipment	necessary	advisable	none
Time	1 week	4 weeks	1 week

Of course, it's an oversimplification, and I'm comparing entry level methods using the easiest ingredients and processes. At a higher level, using fresh ingredients instead of commercial juices, the skill level and equipment demands must increase. But by that time, you'll have a few successes behind you and will have acquired the confidence to take on new challenges.

Beer is the most difficult because it requires boiling. Wine is easier but still needs sugar addition so it can't be made in its original container. Cider only requires you to open the flagon of apple juice and add a little yeast - not difficult! But even if your heart is set on making wine, it makes sense to make some cider first so you'll have something to drink while you're waiting for the wine to finish.

Paraglider's Simple Cider

Volume Loss

 "I've got a bone to pick with you!", she said. 

This sounded ominous but I waited for the details. It turned out that my friend had followed my simple wine method to the letter.

"I used four 1-litre cartons of juice and the sugar syrup addition was made up to exactly a litre too. The fermentation went fine, but when I went to bottle it I only got four full litres and one about three quarters full. I thought I was making five litres of wine. Where did the rest go?"

OK. This is normal. To a first approximation, unfermented wine is just sugar dissolved in water. There's a popular misconception that when you dissolve sugar in water the volume doesn't increase. The truth is that the volume does increase, but not by as much as the volume of added sugar. The sugar molecules occupy the spaces between the water molecules. It's a neat exercise in packing but it's not perfect and the total volume does increase.

Fermentation breaks down the dissolved sugar producing CO₂ and ethanol. Some CO₂ stays in solution but most escapes as bubbles. This reduces the total liquid volume, but the effect is masked while the bubbles are present, because they take up some space, so the surface level stays artificially high. This is why volume loss appears to happen quickly, towards the end of fermentation when the bubbling stops. 

Another cause of volume loss is yeast growth. The initial yeast addition is less than a teaspoonful. But the final sediment is many times greater and largely comprises dead yeast cells. Where do they come from? Well, they are organisms and so are made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen (which come from the sugar) and also nitrogen from the fruit juice. It follows that if you remove dissolved molecules into a sediment, the volume must decrease. Again, this is masked, because the sediment also takes up space.

All of which explains that volume loss is to be expected. Now, what to do about it? Rather than top up to get that fifth litre, I prefer to capture four full litres and one 75cl bottle either for immediate drinking or, if a bit cloudy, for cooking. Waste not, want not