Growing up in New England with its abundance of Cortlands and Macintoshes every fall, I spent some time, as did my Yankee forebears, experimenting with ways to make hard cider. But it was not until I went to Iowa that I learned the country method of home winemaking.
Rural southeastern Iowa, which surrounds the University of Iowa where I went to graduate school, is a land of small farms, corn fields, vegetable gardens, root cellars, fruit trees and, yes, rhubarb patches. Rhubarb, or “pie plant” as my grandmother used to call it, is usually thought of as good for pie filling and not much else. But for the farmers in this rural area, many of whom are of German descent, the best use of rhubarb is for making piestengel (“stengel” is the German word for “stalk”), a somewhat tart white wine with a slightly pinkish tint. Probably brought over from the Old Country, their recipe for making rhubarb wine relies on natural fermentation and is simplicity itself.
