Skip to main content
Drink

Wine From Rhubarb

A fermented beverage made from rhubarb juice, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Rhubarb and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,852 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Wine From Rhubarb

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Crush the rhubarb stalks and filter the juice.

Ferment

  1. Mix the rhubarb juice with soft water and white sugar.

  2. Ferment the mixture in casks with the bung out.

  3. Replace any loss with sweetened water as it ferments.

Finish

  1. When the liquor is clear, seal the casks or bottle it.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Rhubarb + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,852 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rhubarb juice
Provides the main flavour and the fermentable base of the wine.
White sugar
Feeds the yeast, which turns sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Soft water
Dilutes the juice and sugar to a drinkable liquid volume for fermentation.

The step that matters

Replacing lost liquid during fermentation. Fermentation foams and loses liquid, and topping up with sweetened water keeps the casks full so air exposure stays low and the wine does not spoil.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes