Although wines known today as orange wines have nothing of the citrus fruit in them, my paternal grandmother, Helen S. Wright, included several recipes in her book on wine making that were made from Seville oranges. One of her recipes includes raisins in addition to Seville oranges and requires a one year aging time. Neither orange wine nor raison wine is new but the combination of the two fruits in the same wine seems to be somewhat novel.
Here is the recipe for orange wine with raisins in the words of my grandmother:
Take seven and one-half pounds of new Malaga raisins, pick them clean, and chop them small. You must have five large Seville oranges: two of them you must pare as thin as for preserving. Boil about two gallons of soft water till a third part be consumed; let it cool a little. Then put five quarts of it hot upon your raisins and orange peel; stir it well together, cover it up, and when it is cold, let it stand five days, stirring it up once or twice a day. Then pass it through a hair sieve, and with a spoon press it as dry as you can, and put it in a runlet fit for it, and put to it the rinds of the other three oranges, cut as thin as the first; then make a syrup of the juice of five oranges with one-quarter pound of white sugar. It must be made the day before you tun it up; stir it well together, and stop it close. Let it stand two months to clear, then bottle it up; it will keep three years, and is better for keeping.
To buy Old Time Recipes for Home Made Wines by Helen S. Wright from Amazon.com Click Here.
Karen Meyers