Patience Pays Off
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday February 7, 2006
If homemade nocino sounds nuts, try making your own rhubarb champagne - but be warned, it's non-alcoholic.
The hills are alive with fermentable ingredients, or so Julie Andrews might have sung if she lived down our way. It seems I can't look at a bush, berry, fruit, flower or vegetable these days without seeing a potential bottle of plonk.Regular readers will recall the batch of estate-grown nocino I concocted some 14 months ago, using green walnuts collected from the ancient tree in our backyard (and a recipe off the net for this rustic Italian liqueur). I promised to keep you posted with the results but, truthfully, I was secretly hoping you'd all forgotten about it. For the first eight months or so the stuff looked like a cross between sump oil and Spirulina - a murky, impenetrable greenish-brown, while the astringent aftertaste of the immature walnut oil would have stripped the ivory off an elephant's tusk. At some point I packed the bottles away ina dark recess of the shed and quietly wrote off the project as another interesting failure, never to be repeated.Sometime in the new year I pulled out a bottle and couldn't quite believe the miraculous transformation that had taken place. The colour had morphed to dark chocolate and the taste had mellowed amazingly with pleasant rancio notes replacing the enamel-stripping tannins. OK, there are still some raw flavours , but I hope another year spent maturing in the shed should produce something pretty spectacular. My mate Raf reckons my nocino is a bit of alright and he should know - he boasts impeccable Calabrian bloodlines and has just returned from a drinking tour of Italy.Forget about that pesky little edelweiss Ms Andrews warbles on about - I can't wait for my elderberries to ripen so I can knock up a batch of wine (and hope it's just half as good as that of my neighbour, Ruth). Elderberry wine has the most delicious perfume and a depth of flavour that outguns many red grape varieties and (so Ruth tells me) you can even make wine from elderflowers.She's also converted me to rhubarb champagne, which is non-alcoholic and tastes like it should be doing you some good (just don't tell the ankle-biter, who's given it her seal of approval). I used to make a batch of ginger beer every summer but found that the bottles became over gassy before they were all drunk. The rhubarb fizz gets slurped up in no time.Sure, there have been some flops, such as the plum wine I made a couple of years ago, despite being warned that they just don't have a lot of flavour. It was the plunk-plunk-plunk of plums dropping on a tin roof that must have tattooed my brain and convinced me to turn all that free fruit into plonk. Never again. Mind you, if Ruth's husband ever builds the still he's threatening to, we might be able to turn the stuff into slivovitz (plum brandy).And speaking of spiritual matters, I discovered recently that the aromatic bush I keep running over with the lawnmower is wormwood - the basis for absinthe. Now, I wonder if there's a recipe on the net for that stuff? Rhubarb champagne (non-alcoholic)4.5l water4 cups sugar4 cups rhubarb (finely chopped)1 lemon (chopped)1 cup white vinegarDissolve sugar in water, add remaining ingredients and stir well. Cover with a tea towel and leave 3-4 days (stir once a day). Strain and bottle, leave 14 days or until fully carbonated then refrigerate. It's best to use PET bottles so you can test carbonation and avoid exploding bottles.
© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald