Name: British Grape Wine
Ingredients: grapes; water; 3 pounds lump sugar

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 ↓

British Grape Wine

Ingredients

grapes
water
3 pounds lump sugar

Directions

Prepare the juice

Mash the grapes to form a pulp without breaking the stones.
Squeeze out the juice and strain it through a sieve.
Pour a small quantity of water over the husks and let it stand for 24 hours.
Force out the adhering juice.

Ferment

Add 3 pounds of lump sugar to every gallon of juice.
Allow the liquor to ferment.

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.

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, sugar source and natural yeasts that drive fermentation.
Lump sugar: Feeds the yeast, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.

“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.