Drink Your Own Garden (Batsford, 2013) offers more than 140 delicious recipes that make the most of your garden produce. Author Judith Glover encourages readers to experiment with a variety of fresh produce, from plums to melons, to make your own fruit wines, as well as meads and beers. This following Orange Wine recipe is excerpted from the chapter “Fruit Wine.”
You can purchase this book from the Mother Earth Living store: Drink Your Own Garden.
Orange Wine Recipe
The best oranges to use are sweet, juicy and thin-skinned, and you’ll need about 12 large ones for the required amount of orange juice. As with all citrus fruits, avoid including any white pith or pips. The addition of a little lemon juice helps the acidity of this wine.
• 2 pints fresh orange juice
• 3 pounds sugar
• 2 lemons
• 1 Camden tablet (a handy form of sulfur dioxide for disinfecting and sterilizing)
• 1/2 teaspoon grape tannin
• Water
• Wine yeast
• Yeast nutrient
1. Cut the oranges in half and use a lemon squeezer to press out 2 pints of juice, removing any pips.
2. Make the juice up to 6 pints with cold water.
3. Pare the rind very thinly from 4 of the oranges and add this to the juice. Stir in the crushed Camden tablet, cover and leave for 24 hours. Dissolve the sugar in 2 pints of boiling water, cool, then add to the orange juice together with the yeast and nutrient, the grape tannin and the juice of the lemons.
4. Cover and leave to ferment in a warm place for 4 days, stirring twice daily. Strain the liquid into a fermenting jar, close off with an air-lock and leave to ferment on, racking when the wine begins to clear.
5. Once all fermentation has ended and the wine is completely clear, bottle and store in a cool dark place to mature for at least 6 months.
More recipes from Drink Your Own Garden
• Blackberry Wine recipe
• Peach Wine recipe
• Rosehip Wine recipe
Reprinted with permission from Drink Your Own Garden: A Homebrew Guide Using Your Garden Ingredients by Judith Glover and published by Batsford, 2013. Buy this book from our store: Drink Your Own Garden.
