Rhubarb Wine
I love the taste of rhubarb. Rhubarb crisp has been my favorite dessert since I was a kid. And since we have lived in McCall with several productive plants, I’ve tried rhubarb chutney and rhubarb bbq sauce and they are pretty great too. It’s that crazy tart flavor. My friend Kara and I set out to make a giant batch of rhubarb wine, the first 5 gallon batch of wine I’ve made in my very short winemaking career (of 3 wines). We determined we would need about 25 lbs of chopped rhubarb, and started hoarding it in the freezer as soon as it popped up in spring. The bad thing about rhubarb wine is it takes FOREVER to finish. 18 months forever. I couldn’t wait to get it started, but you can’t make it without the rhubarb, so (with additional donations of rhubarb from the McCall community) we started on July 29, 2017.
Rhubarb Wine
26 3/4 lbs frozen rhubarb, diced
10 bananas (8 frozen brown, 2 ripe fresh) blended
39 oz raisins
12 quarts water
4 2/3 cup orange juice (a little less than a bottle)
6 tsp pectolase
6 tsp yeast nutrient
2 tsp k-meta (more on this below!)
It took two big fermentation buckets to hold all of the ingredients and still leave some room to bubble. We mixed everything evenly between the two buckets and put the lids on to sit for a few days.
Day 2: We added several more ingredients and pitched 1/2 packet of dry yeast into each bucket.
3 1/2 cups strong tea
6.5 lbs sugar dissolved in 8 cups water
Miscalculated sugar needed, so at lunchtime added:
4.0625 lbs sugar dissolved in 2.5 cups water (slight carmelization, oops)
Test the gravity and it said 5% potential alcohol, which I feel was incorrect based on how much was in there. The sample was pulled from the top…the sugar syrup may have settled to the bottom.
Day 7: No fermentation. Added a packet of yeast to each bucket…Premier Rouge and Cote des Blancs. 
Day 9: There has been NO fermentation activity from either bucket. After realizing the conversion from Campden tablets to potassium metabisulfate was HUGELY wrong, I scoured the internet for how to fix your must after you have added enough k-meta to kill everything that lives in it. That wine must was preserved until further notice…I didn’t have to worry about oxidation or about it turning into wine! I saw a lot of posts on wine forums that had it worse than I did…people had added 2 Tbsp of k-meta to a 5 gallon batch, and the advice ranged from ‘toss it’ to ‘add carefully calculated hydrogen peroxide’ to ‘aerate the crap out of it’. I went with the aeration tactic for Plan A. And oh yes, the smell of sulfur dioxide was abundant! Day 9, aerated must through sanitized strainer to dissipate sulfur. Poured it back and forth SO many times. I ended up combining the must into one bucket. Then, since it was well mixed and fermentation hadn’t started, I remeasured the brix and got 20 brix, much closer to what it should have been. I wanted it to be about 22.5, so I used this handy calculation:
(22.5-20)*.125 * 6 gal = 1.875 lbs of sugar
So, take your actual brix (20), subtract it from your target brix (22.5) and multiply the result by .125. Then multiply this number by how many gallons of wine you want to adjust. You will get the lbs of sugar you need to add. It works quite well with table sugar!
I also tested the acidity, 0.75%, which should be excellent for a fruit wine.
Still Day 9, I took 4 cups of must, added 1 tsp yeast nutrient, 1 packet of Premier Rouge (known as a great starter yeast) and pitched it all into the main bucket.
Day 11: Bucket bubbling healthily, stirred down the must.
Day 13: Filtered 2/3 of the rhubarb wine into sanitized carboy with my friend Ashley before work. Did NOT give ourselves enough time. There was a lot of rhubarb sediment to clog up the strainer. Had to finish it later.
Day 51: Racked into new sanitized 6 gallon carboy, topped off with about 3/4 gallons sanitized (boiled) water, 1 cup vodka.
Day 71: Tasted…flat. Low in acidity. Added 1 tsp acid blend.
Later, added another tsp acid blend.
Day 105: Acid balance good! Brings out flavor of the rhubarb. At a point where it should age well. Could use a pinch more acid. Did not rack. Still cloudy.
Day 170: Tasted wine with Kara…it’s so good! Clearing slowly, keeping its rhubarb flavor, but somehow less abrasive and more drinkable. No longer thinking it needs blending. It’s going to be awesome on its own!
The rhubarb wine still has 260 days to go before it’s ready to bottle, and at LEAST another 3 months after that before it is ready to drink. The flavor right now is one-dimensional…just rhubarb. This may be a good blending wine, or it may really change over the next 8 months. I think it will be a good candidate for oak or blending.
Day 233: Cloudy, flavor was not as good as the previous tasting.
Day 260: Added Sparkaloid to the rhubarb wine.
Day 268: Checked on the rhubarb wine, it is finally sparklingly clear! It will need to be racked soon. Almost 9 months in the carboy, and it needs another 3 before bottling.