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Drink

Black Currant Wine

A fermented beverage made from black currants, brandy, water, yeast, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and brandy work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 55 recipes. Both carry ethyl butyrate, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Black Currant Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and ferment

  1. Crush the black currants and combine with water in a large container.

  2. Add brandy and yeast, then stir well.

  3. Cover and let ferment for 8 days.

Bottle and sweeten

  1. After fermentation, bottle the wine and cork it tightly.

  2. For a sweeter wine, mix equal parts juice of boiled fruit and water.

  3. Add 1 pound of sugar per quart, then ferment.

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. Black currant + brandytop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together55 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

  2. Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  3. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 recipes

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

Brandy and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Black currants
Supply the fruit juice and flavour that fermentation turns into wine.
Brandy
Raises the alcohol content and helps preserve the finished wine.
Yeast
Converts the fruit sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and feeds the yeast, so it can restart fermentation.

The step that matters

Adding sugar before corking. Sugar added to wine still containing active yeast will ferment again, producing gas that can build pressure in tightly corked bottles. Make sure fermentation has finished before sweetening and bottling.

Swap the black currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Black currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against brandy, sugar. 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.

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