Skip to main content
Drink

Gooseberry Wine

A fermented beverage made from gooseberries, water, sugar or honey, yeast, and additives, aged for months.

From the Recipes Wiki (Fandom) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓
Illustration of Gooseberry WineIllustration

Why it works: Sugar and champagne work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and 400 recipes mention both. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the must

  1. Boil the water with the sugar or honey and skim if necessary.

  2. Take the stems of the berries (tails may be left) and put them in a straining bag.

  3. Crush the berries in the bag with clean hands or a sterilized potato masher.

  4. Be careful to pick only berries that still look good, as bad berries can cause mold.

  5. Pour the hot water over the crushed berries in the bag.

  6. Add the yeast nutrient.

  7. Wait for the mixture to cool before adding the Campden tablet.

  8. Add the Campden tablet.

  9. Cover and fit with an airlock.

  10. Twelve hours after adding the Campden tablet, add the pectic enzyme.

  11. Cover and fit the airlock again.

  12. Wait another twelve hours.

  13. Add the yeast.

Ferment

  1. Stir down daily.

  2. After one week, remove the bag, being careful not to squeeze it.

  3. After the sediment has settled again, rack the wine into a demijohn.

  4. Bung and fit with an airlock.

  5. Rack the wine once or twice during this secondary fermentation.

Taste and mature

  1. After about four to six months, taste the wine.

  2. If it is too dry, add 57 to 170 grams of sugar boiled in water.

  3. The wine will be drinkable in about a year.

Recipe from the Recipes Wiki (Fandom).

This recipe comes from the Recipes Wiki on Fandom and is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. Our formatting and summaries are shared under the same licence.

Steps grouped into stages for easier reading; the method is the source's own.

The picture is an illustration, not a photo of this recipe · 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Sugar + champagnetop 14% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together400 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Gooseberries
Provide the fruit flavour, acidity and pectin that give the wine its body and character.
Sugar or honey
Feeds the yeast to produce alcohol and adds sweetness that balances the acidity.
Champagne yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Campden tablet
Sulphites the must to suppress wild microbes and oxidation before fermentation.
Pectic enzyme
Breaks down pectin in the fruit so the wine becomes clearer.

The step that matters

Adding the Campden tablet after the mixture cools. Adding sulphite to hot liquid drives off its effect, so the tablet should go in only once the mixture has cooled. It then suppresses wild microbes that could spoil the wine before the yeast takes over.

“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 gooseberry wine recipes

Pearl 5Green 4 See all 79 →

You might also like

Illustration of Champagne PunchIllustrationChampagne Punch24 recipesIllustration of Vegetable SoupIllustrationVegetable Soup350 recipesIllustration of Raspberry VinegarIllustrationRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesIllustration of Brown Coffee with EggIllustrationBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipes