Rhubarb Wine

Right. I don't want to shock anyone here but I'm going to come clean: I've not been updating this here weblog quite as often as I should have. I'm going to do something about this, I promise. In the meantime, here's a recipe for rhubarb wine.

Take 1 (one) truck full of rhubarb:

Decant into four wheelbarrows:

Chop:

Place chopped rhubarb in a suitable container: we used a spare water butt. If you don't have a spare water butt lying around why not pop round to your neighbours' property while he is away on holiday and see if he does? Scrub any algae from the inside with bleach but be sure to rinse carefully unless you want your rhubarb wine to taste like swimming pool.

Mash the 'barb with a half gallon sugar: we used brown sugar and hit it rhythmically with a forestry tool designed to remove bark from felled logs: I'm sure white sugar would be acceptable if you don't have brown.

Add a handfull of baker's yeast and cover with a mesh to keep the mosquitos out and a heavy log to keep anything else out. Leave until 1st September before decanting into jerry cans to store until next year.

And the taste? Well my notes from the vertical tasting reveal the following:

2008 vintage: strong rhubarb nose, sharp fruit notes, bone dry finish. Excellent afternoon refresher.
2009 vintage: tastes and smells like Danish Blue. Cloudy with a dense "island" of grey mold. Two may be related.

Vino Toro

Kate and I have run out of shoe polish to mix with milk so we thought we'd sample some of Argentinia's famous red wine. As I don't know a lot about wine I find it very difficult to make an informed choice but one brand seemed to enjoy a significantly higher profile than the others: indeed very few park benches or patches of wasteground are without an empty box or two of Vino Toro ("Bullswine").

Luckily it also turned out to be the cheapest alcohol available in the supermarket at just £1 for a litre brick. One of the (many) things I like about the packaging for Vin Toro is that the images of grapes used on the "tetrabrick" are extremely pixellated. This may help to keep costs down.

And the taste? Well it didn't taste as much like grapes as I had anticipated: it was more of a mix of ribena/sweet and coffee/bitter. The box doesn't tell you how strong it is but I would say that it was probably stronger than beer, but less strong than spirits like vodka or brandy. Overall it was quite nice.

Wine, then: to be honest I can't really see what all the fuss is about.