Rhubarb Wine - An Inauspicious Beginning

The forced rhubarb thing actually works! As you can see in the picture below, the stalks are pale looking, and the leaves have very little green pigment. The forced rhubarb stalks themselves are very tender, and have none of that celery-like fiber that makes rhubarb so tough.  This is all good, but my  forced rhubarb was not a 100% success.  In places where the rhubarb had received a bit of light before I covered them up, or from imperfectly dark conditions, the rhubarb grew to an intermediate state.  It wasn't quite like the forced rhubarb in the picture below, but it wasn't like normal rhubarb either.

 

(1) Me and my forced rhubarb.

So, having collected all the rhubarb I could, I chopped it all into thin slices.  The result was 17 cups of chopped rhubarb.  I placed it in a big white plastic bucket and added 6 L of water and two crushed Campden tablets.  The Campden tablets are added to keep the bacteria at bay.

(2) Chopped rhubarb in water.

The next morning, I scurried off to the store to get some pectic enzyme.  Pectin is a carbohydrate in cell walls.  Pectic enzyme helps break it down and that, in turn, releases more of the sugars and flavors.  When I returned, and opened the lid on the bucket, I was very surprised.  Overnight, the red colour of the rhubarb had been bleached!

This was initially a mystery to me.  The bucket was rinsed well before use (i.e. perish the thought that there was any bleach leftover from sterilizing).  Campden tablets, however, contain potassium metabisulfite, which is a reducing bleach - something I just learned.  That means it bleaches colours by removing oxygen as opposed to adding oxygen (which is how household bleach and peroxide work).  So, for now, I'm going with the idea that the culprit was the small amount of metabisulfite in the Campden tablets.  It's going to be a "white rhubarb" wine.  At least it still smells like rhubarb!

(3) Bleached rhubarb

I added 1/2 tsp. of pectic enzyme and stirred the mixture occasionally for the next 36 hours.  At 48 hours, I removed the rhubarb from the water by straining.  Then, I added 1 L of white grape juice concentrate, and 14 cups of white sugar.  This was not some magic recipe: I simply kept adding sugar cup by cup until the specific gravity was between 1.095 and 1.100.  The final value was 1.097.

I added 3 tsp. of yeast nutrient and a packet of activated yeast.  And then I went to bed.  The fermentation is now underway in the bucket.  It smells good!