Name: Grape Wine
Ingredients: 20 pounds ripe grapes; 6 quarts boiling water; 10 pounds crushed 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 ↓

Grape Wine

Ingredients

20 pounds ripe grapes
6 quarts boiling water
10 pounds crushed sugar

Directions

Prepare the must

Place grapes in a stone jar and pour boiling water over them.
Allow the mixture to cool.
Squeeze the grapes with your hands.
Cover the jar with a cloth and let it sit for 3 days.
Press out the juice.
Add crushed sugar to the juice.

Ferment and bottle

After 1 week, remove scum.
Strain the liquid.
Bottle the liquid loosely corked.
When fermentation is complete, strain again.
Bottle tightly corked.
Store bottles on their sides in a cool place.

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.
Crushed sugar: Feeds the yeast, which converts it into 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.