Garret Hill  selects only the best rhubarb stalks -photos 250News

Prince George, B.C. – It is  rhubarb harvest time at the Northern Lights Estate Winery in Prince George and it is a bumper crop.Noemi Touchette,  horticultural manager for the  winery  on  P.G. Pulpmill Road,  says the rhubarb  crop  this year  far exceeded her expectations “We were anticipating harvesting about 600 pounds of rhubarb, but I think we are going to go up to a thousand.”  She says the  weather  has been  very  cooperative this year.  Last year,  the first year of planting,   they harvested about 150 pounds of rhubarb.

From harvesting the  rhubarb in the field,  the  stalks are then taken  into the winery  where they are cut into two inch pieces.

( at right,  Haylee  Seiter, Sylvia Rhodes cut the stalks)

Touchette says once the stalks are cut and cleaned,  they will be frozen “It helps in breaking down the cells and releasing the juice, so we can be making wine with that rhubarb in 9 months if we wanted to.”

A second harvest of rhubarb will  happen in July, with  gooseberries, raspberries some haskap and  black current  on the  harvest ‘to-do’ list.

Winery owner, Pat Bell says that second harvest of rhubarb could produce another 500 to a thousand pounds “That’s great, that’s what we need for full production of wine.”  He says 2,000 pounds of rhubarb  can help create   about 3,000 bottles of wine,  but it won’t be  used to make just  plain rhubarb wine “We use rhubarb as a blending wine, as a stand alone wine, so it’s one  of the four wines that we will have here.”  He says they expect to  harvest between 300 and 400 pounds of black current this year.

The first bottle of wine for the Winery has been bottled says Bell “It was corked last Wednesday,  it’s got a special place, it will never be sold and  will be in a special place of honour forever.  We’ve bottled about 160 cases of wine , what  we call bumbleberry,  it’s a combination of raspberry, saskatoon and blueberry and we have more wine  ready to bottle later this week or next week.”

He expects that by mid July there should be an inventory of 1700 cases of wine “That should get us through the  summer.”

Bell  says  the official opening  of the winery is just a few weeks away.