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I like to think Spring approves of what we do to her rhubarb. In our family, we follow the dictum that if it's spring, it must be rhubarb wine time, a day of sharpened knives and painful amounts of sugar that, with patience, produces a liquid of no mean consequence. Its main ingredient is rhubarb - one of the more misunderstood of Nature's bounty. To many, it's little more than a weed, yet botanically, the rheum rhaponticum is a vegetable. Some are afraid of it since its leaves are poisonous, while others dislike it because it is not to be munched without some preparation, preferably something to do with sugar. Rhubarb is sour, the kind of sour you can feel back in your ears when you crunch down on a stalk. I'll never forget the devilish look on everyone's face when my cousins urged me, just a little girl at the time, to try the green stalk striped with pink. My expression, I'm told, was everything they hoped it would be. (I, too, have yet to be disappointed with the reaction when ever I pull the same stunt.) Rhubarb also has acquired a rather negative connotation since it is slang for a heated discussion or argument. It's an association, I was surprised to learn after a cruise through the dictionary, that apparently came from the practice of early radio broadcasts repeating the word "rhubarb" to simulate crowd noises. Whoever first thought of making wine from it deserves a medal for imagination. Or perhaps pity for reaching such a desperate point. I grew up with rhubarb wine, getting little sips of the delicately pink concoction at Christmas, eventually graduating to thimblefuls and finally to the stage where I'm entrusted with a whole glass. Making rhubarb wine is not difficult, nor is it expensive. At the risk of giving it the reputation of being cheap wine, it figures out to about 80 cents a bottle: You start with rhubarb - lots of it pulling each scarlet base out of the ground until your arms are so full that you trip over the dog for lack of vision. The leaves are lopped off and the stalks washed clean of bugs and grass and other growing things. Then you chop. We chopped 20 pounds of rhubarb last week, slicing the crisp stalks into bitesize chunks, then dumping them into an ordinary, that's right, an ordinary plastic garbage pail. We follow what in moonshining country would be called "The Recipe," a set of instructions passed along by a late great aunt whose rhubarb wine was legendary and whose methods were foolproof. Ten precious pounds of sugar, or half the required amount, are dumped on top of the chopped rhubarb and 16 quarts of lukewarm water poured in. To that is added the juice of 12 lemons plus an unspecified amount of lemon peel. For color, she recommended adding some raspberries which we use in the form of two packages of the frozen variety. That done, the can is covered and left to ferment for nine days, stirring once a day. The rest of the sugar, another 10 pounds, then is added and it's left to sit for nine more days, getting the daily swish. After that, it's strained or siphoned into a big jug where it sits for six weeks before being transferred to bottles. Our jug has an air lock that makes for a wine of greater clarity, but my great aunt, using an o1der and simpler method, just strained it into her serving jugs and left the caps loose. The wine is drinkable in three months, but is better if you can keep your hands off it for a year. It's a sweet wine, better sipped by itself instead of served with a meal. It's a wine I associate with winter, since it's passable by Thanksgiving time, yet is quite refreshing when spritzed with a little club soda and iced in the summer. More than that, though, it's tradition and something you can look upon as your own. I'm sure that's how Spring regards it, too. ______________________________________________________ Originally published in the Sioux Falls Argus Leader as "Spring, a time for rhubarb wine," June 9, 1980. Reprinted in Prairie Beat by Kim Ode in 1987. Copyright © 1980 by the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. Used by permission. For news and features about Sioux Falls and the region, see argusleader.com, the official site for the Sioux Falls Argus Leader. |