Recipe - 3 gallons
- Juice of 30 Organic Juicing Oranges
- Juice of 18 Organic Italian Clementines
- Juice of 6 Organic Lemons
- Juice of 2 Organic Pink Grapefruit
- Juice of 1 lime
- Zest from Organic 24 oranges and 4 Organic lemons
- 4.5 kg Sugar
- 2 Teaspoon Citric Acid
- 2 Teaspoon Tartaric Acid
- 4 Teaspoon Pectolase
- 6 Teaspoon Yeast Nutrient
- Water to 3.5 gallons
- Yeast (Gervin 3, GV3)
- Original Gravity 1124
Method
This is a labor of love so use your time well. Start with a clean and tidy working area, you'll need the space. put the sugar in a large pan and add about a gallon of water. Bring it to the boil and so dissolve the sugar, stir occasionally to make sure there isn't a lump of sugar burning on the base. While you're letting that happen to wash the oranges and lemons you'll be zesting.
Now zest the oranges and lemons, fastidiously. You don't want any pith in your wine, it'll make it bitter. Which is not the same as sour, it doesn't work. Be a real stickler for this. I use a potato peeler to get the zest off and then still take a sharp knife to the skin to remove all traces of pith. If you know the expression "the most dangerous thing in a kitchen is a blunt knife" then you'll know the value of a regularly sharpened knife. Sharpen it and you'll save vast amounts of time and won't chop your fingers off or pulp the zest. If you have a scary grater that you've injured yourself with previously then its probably a good thing to use. But resist the temptation to get as much zest as possible, instead, aim for getting the very best quality zest only.
By the time you've done this the sugar solution will probably be boiling. Tip it into your fermenting bin and put the lid on. The steam will do a great job of sterilizing it, tho you should have made sure it was clean and chemical-free already. Chop up the zest into pieces about half the dimensions of a match stick. Put the zest into a muslin bag and tie it up. Add to the fermenting bin and put the lid on.
Now juice all the rest of the fruit. Hold on, don't use a juicing machine. This must be an old skool stylee. A juicing machine will add loads of tiny wee fragments of pith, pips, and juice that has been in contact with macerated pith and pips. That'll make your wine bitter and you won't like it. So you gotta get that old skool orange juicing gizmo or squeezer out and give yourself some hand cramps. No other option. And if you're not in practice then you may need to up the fruit content by 10-30%. I have strong hands and use them a lot for repetitious stuff (which all sounds quite deviant but actually, I walk with crutches ... so it's very boring!). In short, I get more juice from my fruit than most would. Is that showing off ;-)
Add the juice to the fermenting bin and put the lid on. Then dissolve all the other stuff (except the yeast) in water, 0.5 - 1 liter should do it, and add to the fermenting bin. You've probably got somewhere close to 2 gallons in there, so make the volume up to 3 gallons and measure the gravity with your hydrometer. Hopefully, it's way high, even beyond your hydrometer scale. Mine was something like 1135, off the scale so couldn't tell, had to guesstimate. I added enough water to make the volume up to 3.5 gallons. Including the muslin bag of zest. The gravity than was 1124. The last brew was 1122 and that wine was delicious. So I stopped there. it's close enough.
Then I added my yeast. This is probably the most important wine to make a good choice of yeast for. Something sweet and strong really needs yeast that you can depend upon to do what it says "on the tin". I used to use Vintner's Harvest Sauternes yeast, and it worked great.. Then I couldn't get it and was told that Gervin number 3 (GV3) was great for sweet wines with a high alcohol by volume and starts fine in a super sweet must. So I use that, sprinkle it onto the surface, put the lid on, tightly.
As for all your other brews after a few days to a week or so move the wine to secondary fermentation, and when you do remove the muslin bag of zest. I think you can err on the side of length for this brew. Maybe primary ferment for up to 10 days. Keep an eye on it tho. It may be slow to start due to the high sugar content. So it may need extra sloshy stirring (i use an old skool egg/cream whisk) to help the yeast bud (breed). Or may need more time to get busy. This is a sweet strong wine, everything about it takes longer.
When it's stopped fermenting, which may be weeks or months, then rack it to fresh demi-johns. That is siphon so you leave the sediment behind. And if it's still fermenting after 2 months and has deposited substantial sediment (0.5 - 1.0 cm) then rack it anyway and let it ferment more with much-reduced sediment. It may take a long time but the sediment can taint the wine. ultimately the best bet is to keep an eye on the gravity too. If it's not going down quickly then leave it on the sediment cos it'll need all the yeast it can get. But if it is going down rapidly then you can afford to remove most of the sediment. There's a bit of an art to this, and you'll probably get close enough to a brilliant result however you do it. From there on you'll be refining this wine.
The wine, if I remember right, always clears without needing finings. Don't expect to drink it until it's at least 6 months old. A year is a respectful wait and worth it. And if you have enough capacity to set a bottle or two aside and forget about them then some years later you'll be in heaven when you open one.
If - at the bottling stage - you're at all unsure about whether to use stabilizers like Campden tablets and potassium sorbate (both) then use them. This is sweet wine with a high tolerance yeast. There will be enough residual sugar for more fermentation and as conditions change your tiny invisible yeasts may burst back into life, start to bud, and ferment. If this happens in a bottle you'll either blow the cork or if using a screw cap your bottle will go off like a glass grenade. In a normal wine, the low final gravity at bottling is often safety enough. but with a high final gravity then caution is wisdom.