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Red and Black Currant Wine

A fermented wine made from equal parts red and black currants, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and black currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 72 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Red and Black Currant Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Mash the red and black currants to extract the juice.

  2. Dilute the juice with an equal quantity of water.

  3. Add 1 pound of sugar for every quart of diluted juice.

  4. Transfer the mixture into a cask, reserving a little for topping off.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Place the cask in a warm location to ferment.

  2. Once fermentation has stopped, seal the cask tightly.

  3. When the wine is clear, remove the sediment and 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. Red currant + black curranttop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together72 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

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

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Red currants
Provide the main fruit juice, along with flavor and natural acidity.
Black currants
Add depth of flavor and color to the juice.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.

The step that matters

Sealing the cask after fermentation stops. Sealing too early, while fermentation is still active, can trap built-up carbon dioxide and cause pressure. Waiting until fermentation has clearly stopped keeps the wine stable.

Swap the red currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (black currant, sugar):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Red currantthe original
  3. Blueberryfits less well
  4. Raspberryfits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against black currant, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More currant wine recipes

Black 28Red 22Sauce 9White 8 See all 158 →

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