Name: Black Currant Wine
Ingredients: 4 pounds black currants; 2 gallons water; 16 pounds crushed sugar

Why it works: Black currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Black Currant Wine

Ingredients

4 pounds black currants
2 gallons water
16 pounds crushed sugar

Directions

Prepare the juice

Remove stems and leaves from the currants and place them in an open vessel.
Cover the currants with water, noting the amount, and mash every berry with a pestle.
Let the mixture stand for 24 hours to dissolve the pulp.
Strain the mixture through a coarse bag to extract the juice.

Ferment and age

To every gallon of juice, add 2 gallons of water and 4 pounds of crushed sugar.
Transfer the mixture into a cask, reserving some to top off during fermentation.
Place the cask in a cool, dry room to ferment, topping off as needed.
Once fermentation ceases, seal the cask for 9 months before bottling.

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.

Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together393 recipes

Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

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

What each ingredient does

Black currants: Provide the juice, acidity and flavour that form the body of the wine.
Crushed sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbonation in the wine.

“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.