Those of you who love blood oranges don’t need to be told how exquisitely wonderful they are. In the kingdom of citrus, blood oranges are royalty. You know that every bite is an explosion of sweet, deep orange flavor, with hints of raspberry.

I wish there were more of you, then growers would grow more, and blood oranges would be easier for everyone to get their hands on.

The problem is, I’m convinced, the name. “Blood” oranges. The shock of cutting into a blood orange for the first time and not seeing the familiar orange, but vivid garnet red, which if perfectly ripe drips its blood colored juices everywhere, is just too much for many of us. It looks like blood. Why in the world would we want to eat a fruit that reminds us of blood?

If however, the marketing powers that be renamed the blood orange “Sangria Orange”, then there would be no issue. Sangria comes from the word “sangre” which means “blood” in Spanish, but most English speakers don’t know that; to most of us sangria is simply a red wine drink spiced with oranges. Instead of conjuring up images of some poor animal freshly slaughtered we would think happy thoughts of festive Sangria. We would imagine this orange to be the color of red wine, not blood. Renaming a fruit has been done before. Some marketing board in New Zealand came up with the idea of promoting Chinese gooseberries as kiwifruit. And now kiwifruit are so popular around the world the word kiwi is even a color, kiwi green.

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