Skip to main content
Drink

Ginger Wine

A fermented alcoholic beverage flavored with cinnamon, pimento, mace, capsicum, ginger, and sweetened with sugar and tartaric acid.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and ginger match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,380 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Ginger Wine

to make 40 gallons

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the infusion

  1. Macerate the cinnamon bark, pimento, mace, capsicum, ginger root, and alcohol for 15 days.

  2. Strain or filter the mixture.

Make the wine

  1. Dissolve the tartaric acid and cream of tartar in warm water to make syrup.

  2. Add the syrup to the strained mixture.

  3. Clarify with the egg whites.

  4. Add soft water to make a total of 40 gallons.

  5. Color with cochineal and let it stand for 6 months before use.

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. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Cinnamon + capsicumtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,684 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  3. Capsicum + gingertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Sugar + creamtop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together43,450 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  5. Cinnamon + macetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,611 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Ginger root
Supplies the main spicy, pungent flavor that defines the wine.
Cinnamon bark
Adds warm, sweet aromatic flavor during the maceration.
White sugar
Provides sweetness and body to balance the alcohol and acidity.
Tartaric acid
Adds acidity that brightens flavor and helps keep the wine stable.
Egg whites
Clarify the wine by binding particles that are then removed.
Alcohol
Extracts flavor from the spices and preserves the finished wine.

The step that matters

Clarify with the egg whites. Egg white proteins coagulate and carry suspended particles down as they settle, clearing the wine. Adding them carelessly, or without allowing time to settle and filtering afterward, leaves the wine cloudy.

Swap the mace

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

  1. Nutmegfits better
  2. Cardamomfits better
  3. Clovefits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against cinnamon, capsicum, ginger, sugar, cream, 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 BeerGinger Beer11 recipesCinnamon TinctureCinnamon Tincture10 recipesGinger TeaGinger Tea9 recipes