According to Wikipedia, orange wine is a type of wine made from white wine grapes which are fermented with their skins. Since the skins contain color pigment, phenols, and tannins that would normally be separated early in the conventional production of white wine, orange wine has a different color, flavor and texture than ordinary white table wines. The unique process that results in orange wine goes back hundreds of years in Slovenia and Friuli-Venezia Giula, thousands of years in the eastern European country of Georgia where it was known as amber wine due to its color. The name orange wine for this beverage was initiated in 2004. My paternal grandmother, Helen S. Wright, did not include any recipes for amber wine in her book Old Time Recipes for Home Made Wines, but has several for orange wine made from oranges.
Here is one of Grandmother’s recipes for orange wine in her own words:
Put twelve pounds of fine sugar and the whites of eight eggs well beaten into six gallons of spring water; let it boil and hour, skimming it all the time. Take it off and when it is pretty cool, put in the juice and rind of fifty Seville oranges, and six spoonfuls of good ale yeast, and let it stand two days. Then put it into your vessel, with two quarts of Rhenish wine, and the juice of twelve lemons. You must let the juice of lemons and wine and two pounds of double refined sugar stand close covered ten or twelve hours before you put it in the vessel to your orange wine, and skim off the seeds before you put it in. The lemon peels must be put in with the oranges; half the rinds must be put into the vessel. It must stand ten or twelve days before it is fit to bottle.
To buy Old Time Recipes for Home Made Wines by Helen S. Wright from Amazon.com Click Here.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia
Karen Meyers