Orange Wine
One gallon juice of sour oranges, four gallons water, twenty pounds sugar. Boil it and clarify with the whites of two eggs; skim the liquid till the scum has disappeared. Pour into a vessel of suitable size, taking the precaution to first strain it through flannel. Add three-quarters of a bottle of raw juice and let it ferment. Bottle in six months. Put less sugar if you prefer a wine less sweet.--Mrs. N.
A country fruit wine scaled for a household barrel rather than a carboy. The proportions work, but the sugar is very high and the fermentation is left entirely to chance, so both need thought before you start.
- Scale and yieldFive gallons of must, which finishes at roughly 25 standard 750 ml bottles. Halving or quartering the whole recipe is easy since everything is in round proportions: one part juice to four parts water, four pounds of sugar per gallon of finished volume.
- "Sour oranges"These are bitter or Seville oranges, not underripe sweet ones. They are acidic and aromatic, sold in winter in Latin and Caribbean markets as naranja agria; bottled sour orange juice is an acceptable substitute. A gallon of juice takes a great many fruit -- likely 25 lb or more, depending on how juicy they are.
- The sugar is the hingeFour pounds of sugar per gallon is more than most yeast will ferment out. A wine yeast typically stalls somewhere around 14 to 16 percent alcohol, and a wild ferment usually gives up well before that, leaving a heavily sweet, port-like liquid. The closing line about using less sugar is the important one: two to two and a half pounds per gallon gives something closer to a dry table wine.
- Clarifying with egg whiteThe recipe's order is compressed: it says to boil and clarify with the whites of two eggs. In the usual technique the beaten whites go into the cool or barely warm liquid, which is then brought up to a boil so the coagulating albumen carries the haze into the scum. Skim until the surface stays clear, then strain through flannel, for which a clean unbleached cotton or a jelly bag will serve.
- "Three-quarters of a bottle of raw juice"Genuinely ambiguous. It is added after boiling, so its purpose is to reintroduce live yeast and fresh aroma to a sterilised must, most likely from unpasteurised orange juice already working. In a modern kitchen a measured packet of wine yeast, pitched once the must is below 80F, does the same job predictably.
- Fermentation vesselProbably an open crock or a loosely bunged cask, though the recipe says only "a vessel of suitable size." Use a food-grade fermenter with an airlock and leave a third of the headspace, since a must this sugary throws a vigorous head. Everything the cooled must touches should be sanitised.
- "Bottle in six months"Six months in bulk is a sensible primary and settling period, but do not bottle on the calendar alone. If sugar remains and the wine is still working, sealed bottles can build enough pressure to burst. Confirm with a hydrometer that the gravity has been stable for two weeks.
- TemperatureFerment cool and steady, 60 to 70F. A warm Virginia pantry in summer pushes citrus wines toward harsh, solvent-like flavours.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1877, gathers contributions from named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, and its wine and cordial chapter assumes that a household still made its own drink from whatever fruit came to hand. Sour or Seville oranges reached the upper South by coastal trade from Florida and the West Indies, arriving in winter, and their acidity made them better suited to fermenting and marmalade than to eating out of hand. Recipes of this kind sit in a long English tradition of "made wines" from cowslips, gooseberries, elderberries and citrus, in which a great deal of sugar stands in for the natural richness of grape juice, and boiling with egg white served the same clarifying function that a modern winemaker gets from fining agents and filtration. The instruction to keep back some raw juice for the ferment reflects an era before packaged yeast, when a cook's starters were the live organisms in unheated fruit or the barm and ale yeast that came from brewing.