My Orange Wine Experience So Far
Hey All!
I started my first orange wine this past Saturday using a recipe from the book The Home Winemaker's Companion: Secrets, Recipes, and Know-How for Making 115 Great-Tasting Wines. It is a great resource with a bunch of easy to follow recipes. You can find it by searching for its title on Amazon. I wish I could post the link, but I am still to new to the forum.
I purchased about 60 lbs of oranges for it to make 5 gallons of orange wine. Found the oranges for cheap at Costco for $6 for 8 lbs. I had to start off with thinly peeling about 30 oranges and dropping the peels into my primary along with some boiling water overnight. There is no real explanation as to why you do this, and still I don't have a clue besides my guess that you are getting aromatics out of the peels.
Afterwords I juiced the rest with a Black and Decker citrus juicer, and blended the already peeled orange slices (after removing the pith because that can make your wine uber bitter) until liquefied, then strained them into the primary.
I added then a gallon of water, a pound of raisins, 12 lbs of cane sugar, grape tannin, and yeast nutrients. Once my temp became agreeable, then added my yeast. I used Enoferm ICV-D47 yeast so it would come out a little more dry.
I just moved it from my primary to secondary, leaving behind the must, and now I wait for the fermentation process to naturally complete. Then I will be leaving it in the secondary for the next month, then I will rack and repeat the process for the next 3 months. Then I bottle, wait a while and hopefully will have a great tasting wine!
I hope this helps anyone who is thinking about making an orange wine.