Orange Wine Recipe

So I've just blended two wines and I want to write about the result, which means that I have to write up the wines that I blended. It's about time I got around to these recipes. The first is Orange Wine, well that's what I have called it for years, but really it's a mixed citrus wine and that's how I refer to it in the list on the page of my brews.

Citrus Wine 

Recipe (3 Gallons)

30 Oranges - Maroc or Helios
16 Clemantines
6 Lemons
2.5 Pink Grapefruit
2 Teaspoons Citric Acid
2 Teaspoons Tartaric Acid
6 Kg Sugar
Nutrient
4 Teaspoons Pectolase
Sauternes Yeast

Here's your piccie

Method

Zest 24 Oranges and 4 lemons. Take great care to avoid collecting the pith with the zest. Squeeze all the rest of the fruit for juice. Dissolve the sugar in hot boiled water. Put all the ingredients into your fermenting vessel apart from the yeast. Make up to 3 gallons with water, cover and allow to cool to less than 30'C. Then measure the OG. This one came in at a hefty 1129! No problem for Sauternes yeast tho. So pitch your yeast, stir sloshily and cover. After a few days transfer to secondary fermenter(s) and fit airlocks. Rack, degas, stabilise etc as and when needed as usual. This wine always clears unaided for me, in a couple or 3 months.

Thoughts

This is a dessert wine. It's very sweet, FG was 1021 and that gave an ABV of around 14.7%. It's good served chilled. If you don't like sweet wines then you'll want to use considerably less sugar.

The list of fruits is not set in stone. You could use jaffas, navels, tangerines, satsumas, mandarins, mineolas, ugly fruit etc. The oranges I chose are good for juicing and thin skinned. The rest I choose based on what is cheap, tastey, juicy and available on the day I go shopping.