Raspberry and rhubarb wine - recipe ?

You can make raspberry wine on its own easily, same for elderberry.

Elderberry wine would need a couple of years or more to mature as it will have a high degree of tanin in it and this takes time to "mellow".

Raspberry wine will come out a nice light red and be good.

The standard ballpark amount is 3lbs of fruit to a gallon and tailor the sugar to your taste, add a little citric acid to them.

Never made rhubarb wine, well cannot recall making any, probably light and slightly sharp. Would come out pale amber I expect and as it is light would mature reasonably quick - 6 months.

Just read through a few books and most say 3-4lbs Rasps.
One however says raspberry wine is difficult and should be made light and dry, it suggests 1 1/2 raspberries and 2 1/4 sugar.

So I have recipies that go from 1.5 lbs of raspberries in a gallon to 4 lbs of raspberries in a gallon. Take your pick.

Wish I hadn't read the books as one recipe is for Coffee Wine  It uses a Tablespoon of Nescafe

If your rhubarb is nice and red, it comes out as a Rose (not sure where me little thingy is to go over the last e!!)

I picked 9.5lbs blackcurrants the other day, but not got enough sugar, so I've frozen them until I go shopping, and I've still got 3lbs of last years elderberries in the freezer which I'm going to mix with them.  Then I've got 20lbs of rhubarb that next door gve me the other day in the freezer too!  Hopefully I won't muck it up this time like I spoiled my elderberry wine last year.  But I'm still drinking it slowly, its not bad with a drop of lemonade!!!!   

I made two batches of vanilla tea wine last year in February.  It tasted so awful when I bottled it I almost poured it down the drain.  Glad I didn't - it now tastes great! The only problem with it is the fact that it seems to retain it's caffeine.  lol

I make rather oddball types of wine - I've made wine from lemonade, limeade, rhubarb, mango, pumpkin, raspberries, you name it.  The best dry ones so far have been the rhubarb, and raspberry.  The rest are sweet wines except for the lemonade wine, which is like drinking liquid lemons without the sour - wonderful for coolers, which is why I made it.  The limeade wine is great with lots of ice and is even better with pink lemonade.  I made the lemonade and limeade wines to use for coolers and they haven't let me down.

Hi there Poultrygeist,

Way to go on the raspberries!  Mine aren't ripe yet - we are had a very late  spring and everything is at least 2 weeks behind where it should be.  (Couldn't even plant my garden before mid June  - we had too much frost.) I did pick a huge amount of rhubarb and froze it as I make the rhubarb wine in the winter.  I will probably be able to pick again in another 2 weeks or so and hopefully by then the raspberries will be ripe as well.  Have you ever made a raspberry/rhubarb wine?  I wonder what that combo would be like.  I have made raspberry/red currant - it was wonderful.

I did laugh a little at wanting your warm spell back - I use a waterbed heating pad to kick-start stubborn batches.  It backfired on me this spring when - somehow the temperature was  set too high and left a dark burn mark on my kitchen floor that was a good foot across.  lol  My husband wasn't too impressed.  Good thing we are planning to redo the kitchen this fall.

You win the prize!!  I am in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada, which is almost smack dab in the middle of the country in the southern part of the province.  Very intuitive of you to pick up the discrepancy between our languages.  Although we do use fall and autumn interchangeably.

You know you can pick you rhubarb all season as long as you remove only the stems on the outside of each plant - picking only the larger ones.  It forces the plant to continue to produce.  I've been doing it for (ouch) decades.  Just make sure you leave at least a few weeks between pickings.  If you haven't been doing it all along this season I would be inclined to leave it till next year as it the larger ones might be a bit bitter by now if they have gotten too big.

I too grew up on my uncle's homemade wine.  My mother wouldn't let my Dad make any after his first attempt - bit of a story to that - I'll have to share it sometime it is really quite funny.

Well, I have to go back to making my 200 cupcakes for my husband's niece's wedding - definitely going to take awhile to do those!  The duds taste great though.

I like the idea of tea wine. Would save having to make a choice of drink when getting in from work!