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Wine, Orange
Seville oranges are used for this purpose; they are best in March. For eighteen gallons of wine half a chest of oranges is required. Pare the rind from about a dozen or two dozen, as more or less of the bitter will be agreeable. Pour over this a quart or two of boiling water, and after letting it stand for twelve hours, strain off the water, which will have extracted much of the essential oil of the oranges. Take the peel off entirely from the remainder of the oranges, squeeze their juice through a bag or sieve, and put it into a cask with about forty-five pounds of white sugar, or fifty-five of the best moist sugar. Soak the pulp in water for twenty-four hours, and after straining this add it to the cask. Repeat this several times till the cask is full. Stir the whole well with a stick till the sugar is dissolved, then set it to ferment. The fermentation is slower than with currant wine, but may be heard hissing for some weeks. When this subsides, close the bunghole, and proceed as in the case of gooseberry wine. Some add brandy. This wine requires to be kept in the cask a year before it is bottled.
A nineteenth-century country wine written for a cask, not a carboy: the quantities assume an eighteen-gallon vessel and a household that bought oranges by the chest. Everything here scales down cleanly by ratio, but the fermentation practice deserves updating.
- The scaleEighteen gallons is roughly 82 litres, or about 110 standard bottles. Scaled down by about twelve, that is a 6- to 7-litre demijohn batch, a more realistic modern project.
- "Half a chest" of orangesA citrus chest was a shipping case whose count varied with fruit size and packer, not a strictly fixed measure. Work instead from the sugar and the juice: use enough Sevilles to fill the cask with strained juice plus the soaked pulp washings, as the original directs.
- Seville orangesBitter (sour) oranges, not eating oranges. Their season is genuinely short — January into March in Britain — and greengrocers and Middle Eastern shops still stock them then. Frozen juice or a mix of sweet orange juice with extra lemon is the usual substitute, but the aromatic bitter peel is the point of this wine.
- The peel infusionParing the rind from a dozen or two and steeping it in boiling water extracts oil from the flavedo. Take the coloured zest only; white pith gives a hard, resinous bitterness that a year in cask will not soften.
- Sugar"Moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined brown sugar, wetter and less sweet per pound than white, hence the fifty-five pounds against forty-five. Modern granulated sugar corresponds to the white figure — about 45 lb per 18 gallons, or roughly 250 g per litre of must, which points at a strong wine of around 14 per cent.
- FermentationThe recipe relies on wild yeast from the fruit and the air, which is why it starts slowly and hisses for weeks. Current practice is a pitched wine yeast plus yeast nutrient, since citrus must is low in the nitrogen yeast needs and stuck fermentations are common.
- The bungholeLeaving the bung open during the vigorous stage lets carbon dioxide and foam escape; closing it after the hiss subsides is the period equivalent of fitting an airlock. Never seal a cask or jar while fermentation is still active.
- SanitationNothing in the original addresses it. Sterilise everything, and use a campden tablet (sodium or potassium metabisulphite) in the must and at racking to keep acetobacter from turning the batch to vinegar during its long time in wood.
- "Some add brandy"A fortifying dose to raise strength and help stabilise the wine; the original does not say at what stage it was added. Reckon on a bottle or two per five gallons if you want it.
- AgeingA year in cask then bottling is not exaggeration for a citrus wine this sweet and this bitter; it drinks harsh young. In glass, rack off the lees every few months instead of relying on the cask.
Bitter oranges arrived in Britain by ship each winter and were consumed almost entirely within a few weeks — marmalade, orange brandy, and country wine were all ways of catching a fruit that would not keep. The recipe belongs among the currant and gooseberry wines that formed a whole domestic economy before cheap bottled wine: a household with a cask, an orchard or a good greengrocer could put down eighteen gallons for the cost of sugar. The cross-references here are telling — the recipe assumes you have already read the gooseberry wine entry and know what to do after the fermentation quiets, which is how these books were used. The reliance on wild yeast is not carelessness but the only method available; commercially cultured wine yeasts did not reach domestic kitchens until well into the twentieth century, and the writer warns that this ferment runs slower than currant.