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Sweet Orange Wine
Methods vary in making orange wine, some wines being made with equal parts of orange juice and water and some with the orange juice alone. In either case three pounds of sugar should be used to each gallon of the liquid. Let ferment in a barrel, covering the bung with cloth. When fermentation ceases (from six to eight weeks) rack off into another barrel, stop bung, and keep in a cool place.
A country wine recipe written for people who owned barrels and trusted wild yeast. The proportions are sound; almost everything else needs restating in modern terms.
- The ratio, plainlyThree pounds of sugar per gallon of liquid (juice, or juice cut half-and-half with water) works out to roughly 360 g per litre in a US gallon, or about 300 g per litre in an imperial one. Either way this is a high-gravity must, more sugar than most yeasts will ferment out, so the wine is likely to stop short of dryness and stay sweet.
- Gallons are not equalA US gallon is 3.79 litres; the imperial gallon of British books is 4.55. Three pounds of sugar in the larger gallon gives a noticeably drier, weaker wine. Match your sugar to whichever gallon you are actually using rather than splitting the difference.
- There is no yeast in this recipeThe original relies on wild yeast from the fruit and the barrel. Citrus juice is acidic, low in fermentable nutrient and often carries preservative on the peel of modern fruit, so a spontaneous start is unreliable. A packet of wine yeast and a yeast nutrient dose is what present-day practice substitutes here.
- Cloth over the bung means an airlockThe cloth lets carbon dioxide escape while keeping insects out. A water-filled airlock and bung does the same job better. Whatever you use, the vessel must stay open to the air until fermentation is genuinely finished.
- Do not stop the bung early"When fermentation ceases" is the hinge of the whole recipe. Six to eight weeks is a rough guide, not a test; with this much sugar a slow ferment can idle and restart. Seal only when a hydrometer shows the reading unchanged over several days, or the trapped gas will build pressure in a sealed container.
- RackingSiphon the clear wine off the sediment without disturbing the lees, and fill the receiving vessel as full as possible. Headspace after racking is where oxidation and vinegar bacteria do their work; a barrel left two-thirds full is at real risk of spoiling.
- Scale and vesselA glass carboy or food-grade fermenter is the practical modern equivalent of the barrel, and everything that touches the must should be sanitised first.
- Juice quantitySweet oranges yield roughly 60-80 ml of juice each, so a single US gallon of straight juice takes something like 50-60 oranges.
Country and household books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries treat orange wine as a standard domestic preserve, alongside cowslip, elderberry, gooseberry and parsnip — home winemaking from whatever fruit came in quantity. Oranges arrived by the box in winter from Spain, Portugal and later Florida and California, and a household that bought them in bulk had a short window to use them before they spoiled; wine, marmalade and candied peel were the three usual answers. Sugar in that proportion is doing two jobs at once, feeding the yeast and preserving what it cannot ferment, which is why these wines were sweet by design rather than by accident. Note that the term means something entirely different now: contemporary "orange wine" is a skin-contact white made from grapes, with no citrus in it at all.