Skip to main content
Drink

Cuebant Wine

A fermented wine made from juice, water, and sugar, finished with whisky after fermentation.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and whisky are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,008 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Cuebant Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mixture

  1. Dissolve the sugar in the water.

  2. Mix the dissolved sugar with the juice.

Ferment

  1. Fill the vessel to the brim, leaving the bung out until fermentation ceases.

  2. Every morning, add fresh juice and water to help remove the skum.

  3. Once fermentation stops, add the whisky to the barrel.

Age and bottle

  1. Seal the barrel tightly and store until February or March.

  2. Rack off and bottle the wine at that time.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Sugar + whiskytop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,008 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and provides the wine's sweetness and eventual alcohol.
Juice
Supplies flavour and the nutrients that keep the fermenting yeast active.
Whisky
Raises the alcohol content, halting fermentation and helping preserve the finished wine.

The step that matters

Add the whisky only after fermentation stops. Adding spirit while the yeast is still active would halt fermentation early, leaving more sugar unfermented and a sweeter, weaker wine. Waiting until activity has ceased lets the yeast convert the sugar first, so the spirit fortifies a finished base.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes