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Orange Wine
Orange wine should be made in March. Boil twenty-eight pounds of loaf sugar with eight gallons of water, and the well-whisked whites and crushed shells of four eggs. Remove the scum as it rises, let the liquid cool, then add the juice of ninety Seville oranges, and mix thoroughly. Strain the liquid, ferment it with half a pound of yeast on a slice of toast, and let it stand for twenty-four hours. Put it into a cask, and when fermentation ceases, which will be when it gives up hissing, bung the cask up closely. The wine may be racked in three months, and bottled in twelve. If it is desired to add the flavour of the orange-peel to this wine, though it will be more generally agreeable without, infuse the rinds of fifty of the oranges in two gallons of the clarified sugar for four days, then strain the liquid, and add it to the rest. If it is considered necessary to have a little brandy in the wine, a quart may be put into the cask with the liquid, and another quart added when the wine is racked off. Time, half an hour to boil the sugar. Probable cost, 2s. 2d. per gallon, exclusive of the brandy. Sufficient for ten gallons.
A ten-gallon batch of country wine, written for a household with a cellar and a cask. The proportions scale down cleanly, and everything hinges on sanitation, which the original never mentions because nobody yet knew to.
- Scale it down firstEight gallons of water and 28 lb of sugar yields about ten gallons — some 60 bottles. Divide by eight and you get 3 lb 8 oz sugar, 1 gallon of water and the juice of about 11 Seville oranges — but note that makes roughly a gallon and a quarter of wine, not a gallon; divide by ten for a true one-gallon test batch.
- Loaf sugarRefined cane sugar sold in a cone and broken up with nippers. Ordinary granulated white sugar is the direct equivalent; the egg-white clarification in the recipe was to remove impurities that modern sugar no longer carries, so it can be dropped.
- Seville oranges and the March dateBitter Seville oranges are a short winter crop, which is why the wine is made in March — the tail end of the marmalade season. Sweet oranges are not a substitute for flavour or acidity; if you use them, expect a flabby wine and add tartaric or citric acid to bring it into balance.
- Yeast on toastHalf a pound of brewer's or baker's barm floated on toast was the period's way of pitching. Use a sachet of wine yeast (5 g per gallon) rehydrated per its packet instead. Bread yeast tends to give out at a lower alcohol level than a wine strain and can leave a bready character.
- NutrientSugar and orange juice give the yeast almost no nitrogen, so this style of must habitually stuck or went sulphurous. A measured dose of yeast nutrient at pitching is the single most useful modern addition.
- Sanitation, not scaldingEverything the cooled must touches should be sanitised. The original relies on the boiled syrup and a fast, vigorous ferment to outcompete spoilage organisms; a fermenter, airlock and no-rinse sanitiser do the job far more reliably than a cask and a bung.
- "Gives up hissing"Bunging a cask the moment visible fermentation stops is how casks burst. With an airlock, wait until the specific gravity reads the same for three consecutive days — typically 0.995 or below — before sealing anything.
- Racking and ageingThree months to first racking and twelve to bottling is sound advice and worth keeping. Young orange wine is harsh; the year in bulk is doing real work.
- The peel option and the brandyInfusing the rinds gives a markedly more bitter, marmalade-like wine — the book's preference for leaving it out reflects Victorian taste, not a technical problem. The two quarts of brandy fortify the batch by a couple of percent and act as a preservative; skip it and the wine keeps perfectly well under airlock.
Orange wine here has nothing to do with the modern skin-contact white wines sold under that name; it is a British country wine, one of dozens — cowslip, parsnip, elderberry, rhubarb — that filled cellars in households where imported grape wine was expensive or awkward to buy. The Seville orange arrived in Britain in bulk each January and February and was worked through fast: marmalade, candied peel, and wine from the juice, with the rinds saved for a separate infusion, as here. The instruction to ferment "with half a pound of yeast on a slice of toast" is a survival from brewing practice: barm skimmed off a working beer was floated on bread, the explanation traditionally given being that it stayed at the surface, where a top-fermenting yeast wants to be.