Skip to main content
Drink

Quince Wine

A fermented quince wine made by boiling quinces, adding sugar, lemon wine, and brandy.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Wine and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,427 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Quince Wine

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Slice the quinces and boil them in 1 gallon of water for 15 minutes.

  2. Add 2 pounds of lump sugar and allow the mixture to ferment.

  3. Stir in 1 gallon of lemon-wine and 1 quart of brandy or other spirit.

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. Wine + brandytop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,427 recipes

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

  2. Quince + lemontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together336 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-hexenal (green, leafy).

  3. Lemon + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,157 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

  4. Quince + brandytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together91 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Quince + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together63 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Quinces
Provide the fruit flavour and pectin-rich body that gives the wine its character.
Lump sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and sweetness in the finished wine.
Brandy or other spirit
Raises the alcohol content and fortifies the wine, helping preserve it.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Applefits better
  2. Pearfits better
  3. Apricotfits better
  4. Lemonthe original

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

Lemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesWine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipes