Skip to main content
Drink

Elder Wine

A fermented beverage made from raisins, sugar, water, elderberry juice, ginger, cloves, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Elder Wine

Why it works: Ginger and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,038 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Elder Wine

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the must

  1. Chop the raisins small and boil the sugar in water.

  2. Pour the hot sugar water over the raisins and stir daily for a week.

  3. Strain the mixture and press out the raisins.

Ferment and age

  1. Add the elder berry juice to the liquor.

  2. Let it ferment for 2-3 days with yeast on top.

  3. Transfer to a barrel, leaving space for fermentation.

  4. Seal the barrel and let it sit until clear and sweetness is gone, then bottle.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Ginger + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Raisin + clovetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,070 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl caproate (fruity, apple peel).

  3. Raisin + gingertop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,242 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Raisin + sugartop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together12,481 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + gingertop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

Sugar and ginger barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Raisins
Provide fruit sugars, body and flavour that the yeast ferments into wine.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast, and the alcohol it produces comes from this sugar.
Yeast
Converts sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Elder berry juice
Adds colour, tartness and the characteristic elderberry flavour.

The step that matters

Leaving the barrel to clear and dry out. Fermentation must finish before bottling. If the wine is bottled while sugar remains, the yeast can keep working and build pressure, so the wine should sit until it is clear and no longer sweet.

Swap the raisin

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

  1. Orangefits better
  2. Quincefits better
  3. Vanillafits better
  4. Raisinthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, ginger, clove. 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.

You might also like

Raisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesGinger PopGinger Pop22 recipesGinger WineGinger Wine12 recipesGinger BeerGinger Beer11 recipes