Name: Grape Wine
Ingredients: 1 gallon grape juice; 2 gallons water; 3 pounds loaf sugar

Why it works: Grape and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,490 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Grape Wine

Ingredients

1 gallon grape juice
2 gallons water
3 pounds loaf sugar

Directions

Make the must

Dissolve the sugar in the grape juice and water mixture.
Let it stand for 24 hours.
Skim off any foam that forms on the surface.

Ferment and bottle

Fill the jugs three-fourths full with the mixture.
Cork the jugs and store them in a cool cellar until cold weather.
Then, bottle the wine.

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.

Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together7,490 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

Grape juice: Provides the fruit base, sugars and flavour that the wine is made from.
Loaf sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.

“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.