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Grape Wine, Sparkling

A sparkling grape wine made by fermenting bruised grapes with sugar, brandy, and isinglass.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Grape and wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 819 recipes. Both carry 1-p-menthene-8-thiol, which smells grapefruit. The science ↓

Grape Wine, Sparkling

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the must

  1. Clean and bruise the grapes in a tub until every berry is broken.

  2. Add 1 quart of cold water for every pound of fruit and leave for 3 days, stirring 2-3 times daily.

  3. Strain the mixture and add 3¼ pounds of lump sugar for every gallon of liquid, stirring until dissolved.

Cask and bottle

  1. Transfer the wine into a cask, keeping it full to the bung, and reserve ½ gallon for topping up as fermentation subsides.

  2. After 10 days, add 1 pint of brandy and ¼ ounce of isinglass for every 5 gallons of wine.

  3. Store the cask in a cool cellar.

  4. Bottle the wine in champagne bottles when the vines bloom the following summer, wiring down the corks.

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. Grape + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together819 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-p-menthene-8-thiol (grapefruit).

  2. Brandy + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,427 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Grape + brandytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together711 recipes

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

  4. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  5. Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,490 recipes

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

Sugar and brandy 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

Grapes
Provide the juice and sugars that ferment into the wine's alcohol.
Lump sugar
Feeds fermentation, producing alcohol and carbonation in the finished wine.
Brandy
Added after fermentation to raise the alcohol level and stabilise the wine.
Isinglass
A fining agent that helps clear the wine by settling out suspended particles.

The step that matters

Keeping the cask full to the bung. A full cask leaves little air above the wine, limiting oxidation and spoilage. Topping up with the reserved half gallon as fermentation subsides keeps the level constant.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits about as well
  3. Applefits about as well
  4. Grapethe original

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