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Drink

Sloe Wine

A fermented wine made from sloes, sugar, water, and spirit, aged for at least a year.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and spirit work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 602 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Sloe Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the sloes

  1. Select sound and ripe sloes, discarding bruised or decayed ones.

  2. Remove the stalks and place the sloes in a large pan.

Make the wine

  1. Pour 1 gallon of boiling water over each gallon of sloes.

  2. Let the mixture soak for 5 days, stirring daily.

  3. Add 4 pounds of sugar for each gallon of liquid and stir until dissolved.

  4. Transfer the mixture to a cask, adding 1 pint of spirit for each gallon and a half of liquid.

  5. Allow the wine to age in the cask for at least 12 months.

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. Sugar + spirittop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 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

Sloes
Provide the fruit flavour, tannin and colour that form the body of the wine.
Loaf sugar
Sweetens the wine and feeds fermentation, balancing the sloes' sharp acidity.
Spirit
Raises the alcohol content, helping preserve the wine during long ageing.

The step that matters

Discarding bruised or decayed sloes. Damaged fruit carries mould and off-flavours that can spoil the whole batch during the long soak and ageing, so only sound, ripe sloes should go in.

“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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