Name: Wine Vinegar
Ingredients: ½ gallon best French vinegar; ½ gallon good white wine

Why it works: Vinegar and white wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,776 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Wine Vinegar

Ingredients

½ gallon best French vinegar
½ gallon good white wine

Directions

Heat ½ gallon of the best French vinegar to boiling point.
Pour the hot vinegar into a small oaken cask that has previously contained wine.
Roll the cask in all directions.
Half fill the cask with good white wine.
Place the cask aside to allow the mixture to develop.

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.

Vinegar + white winetop 11% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together1,776 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

Best french vinegar: Provides the acetic base that the wine is developed into, giving the finished vinegar its sharpness.
Good white wine: Supplies the alcohol that acetic bacteria convert into acetic acid, building the flavour of the new vinegar.

“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.