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Black Currant Wine

A fermented wine made from black currants, water, and loaf sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and black currant work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Black Currant Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Strip the berries from the stalks.

  2. Mash them in a wooden tub.

  3. Let the mash stand for 24 hours.

  4. Press the juice through a coarse bag or sieve.

  5. Pour a small amount of water over the mash. Let it stand for 12 hours.

  6. Squeeze out the liquor.

  7. Add it to the previously obtained juice.

Sweeten and ferment

  1. For every gallon of diluted juice, add 4 to 5 pounds of loaf sugar.

  2. Put the mixture into a cask, filling it completely.

  3. Allow the fluid to ferment until the hissing noise diminishes.

  4. Drive in the bung.

  5. Leave the spile open.

  6. Loosen the peg after a few days to release any excess carbonic acid gas.

  7. Repeat this until there is no danger of excessive expansion.

  8. Tighten the spile permanently.

Rack and bottle

  1. Rack the wine after six months.

  2. Bottle it when perfectly transparent.

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 + black curranttop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Black currants
Provide the juice, flavour and acidity that form the base of the wine.
Loaf sugar
Feeds the fermentation and supplies the sweetness that balances the wine's acidity.

The step that matters

Loosen the peg during fermentation. Fermentation releases carbon dioxide, and if the cask is sealed too early the pressure can build until it bursts. Venting in the first days, then sealing only once the gas output has slowed, keeps the cask safe.

“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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