Skip to main content
Drink

Ginger Wine

A homemade sweetened drink flavoured with ginger, lime juice and lime peel, fortified with whiskey.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ginger and lime match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 2% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,621 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Ginger Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the ginger syrup

  1. Pound and boil the ginger in 5 bottles of water for 1 hour.

  2. Strain the mixture and add the sugar and lime juice.

  3. Incorporate the egg whites, boil again, and skim off any foam.

Infuse and finish

  1. Soak the lime peels in 1 bottle of whiskey for 2 days.

  2. Add the soaked peels and 2 more bottles of whiskey to the syrup.

  3. Strain through flannel until clear.

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. Ginger + limetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,621 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

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

  3. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  4. Sugar + limetop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,332 recipes

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

  5. Ginger + eggtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,337 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Ginger
Provides the main spicy, aromatic flavour of the wine.
Sugar
Sweetens the wine and provides the body that fermentation would otherwise supply.
Egg whites
Bind to impurities and rise to the surface, so skimming removes them and the wine clears.
Lime juice
Adds acidity that brightens the sweetness and balances the flavour.
Lime peel
Contributes aromatic citrus oils that add fragrance to the finished drink.
Whiskey
Adds alcohol that preserves the wine and carries the flavour of the peels.

The step that matters

Skim the foam after adding the egg whites. Egg white proteins coagulate and carry impurities to the surface as foam. Removing that foam leaves the liquid clear; leaving it in makes the wine cloudy and gives it an off taste.

Swap the lime

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

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Limethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ginger, sugar, egg. 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.

You might also like

Ginger PopGinger Pop22 recipesGinger WineGinger Wine12 recipesGinger BeerGinger Beer11 recipesGinger TeaGinger Tea9 recipes