Skip to main content
Drink

Grape Wine

A homemade wine made by crushing grapes, fermenting with water, adding sugar, and aging for six months.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

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. Bruise the grapes and mix with water.

  2. Let the mixture stand for a week without stirring.

  3. After a week, pour off the liquid carefully.

Ferment and age

  1. Add 3 pounds of lump sugar to the liquid and transfer it to a vessel.

  2. Once fermentation stops, seal the vessel tightly.

  3. In six months, the wine will be ready to 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.

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

Ripe grapes
Provide the juice and natural sugars that ferment into alcohol.
Lump sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, adding alcohol and body to the wine.

The step that matters

Pouring off the liquid after a week. Pour off the liquid carefully so the settled grape solids stay behind. Disturbing the sediment can add cloudiness and off-flavours to the finished wine.

“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 grape wine recipes

You might also like