The bottled thing (house apéritif, beverage)
Orange wine
DrinkReconstruction🍯 ☕facile30 min + 40 days maceration
An amber, bittersweet homemade apéritif made by macerating rosé wine with oranges (including a bitter one), sugar, a little eau-de-vie, and a fragrant pod, then filtered after a few weeks. Served very cold in the shade of olive trees.
The bottled thing (house apéritif, beverage)
An amber, bittersweet homemade apéritif made by macerating rosé wine with oranges (including a bitter one), sugar, a little eau-de-vie, and a fragrant pod, then filtered after a few weeks. Served very cold in the shade of olive trees.
Take the orange: under pressure, it bounces back, refuses to yield, then releases its juice and perfume in a kind of oppression — it is the same when you throw it into wine. You slash the skins, drown them in rosé with sugar, a drop of alcohol, a little bitter peel, and you seal the demijohn. Then you wait — patience is the best ingredient of things. Forty days later, you filter this bitter gold, and drink a finger of it, well chilled, watching Le Bar-sur-Loup descend toward the sea.
Ingredients
- •Local rosé wine — several liters (base)
- •Oranges (including one bitter) — a few (flavor, bitterness)
- •Sugar — generously (sweetness)
- •Eau-de-vie — a glass (stabilization)
- •Vanilla pod or cinnamon stick — one (spice)
How it was made : Orange wine is a traditional Provençal domestic apéritif, made in winter when bitter oranges from the bitter orange tree (grown on the Côte d'Azur, especially around Grasse and Le Bar-sur-Loup) arrive. Each household had its own ratio of sugar and eau-de-vie; it improved in the cellar.
Sources : Francis Ponge, « L'Orange », dans Le Parti pris des choses, Gallimard, 1942 · René Jouveau, La Cuisine provençale de tradition populaire, 1963