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Drink

Grape Wine

A fermented grape beverage made by mashing grapes, adding sugar, and aging in a cask.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Grape and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,490 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Grape Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the must

  1. Mash the grapes.

  2. Strain them through a cloth.

  3. Put the skins in a tub.

  4. Cover them with just enough water.

  5. Strain the juice into the tub with the skins.

  6. Add 3 pounds of sugar for every gallon of the mixture.

Ferment

  1. Let it ferment in an open tub covered with a cloth for 3 to 7 days.

  2. Skim off any foam each morning.

  3. After fermentation, pour the juice into a cask.

  4. Leave the cask open for 24 hours.

Age and bottle

  1. Bung the cask.

  2. Seal it with clay to keep air out.

  3. Let the wine remain in the cask until March.

  4. Draw it off.

  5. Bottle it.

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. Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,490 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

Grapes
Provide the juice and skins that supply the wine's flavour and colour.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The step that matters

Skim off any foam each morning. Foam during fermentation can harbour spoilage microbes and off-flavours, so removing it daily helps keep the wine clean.

“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.

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