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Black Currant Wine

A fermented beverage made from black currants, water, and crushed sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Black Currant Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Remove stems and leaves from the currants and place them in an open vessel.

  2. Cover the currants with water, noting the amount used.

  3. Mash the currants with a pestle or pounder and let them sit for 24 hours.

  4. Strain the mixture through a coarse bag to extract the juice.

Make the must

  1. For every gallon of juice, add 2 gallons of water and 4 pounds of crushed sugar.

  2. Transfer the mixture into a cask, reserving some to top off during fermentation.

Ferment and age

  1. Place the cask in a moderately cool, dry room to ferment.

  2. When fermentation stops, 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.

  1. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Currants
Provide the main fruit flavour, acidity and juice for the wine.
Crushed sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and sets the sweetness and alcohol level.
Water
Dilutes the juice to a drinkable balance of flavour and acidity.

The step that matters

Topping off the cask during fermentation. Fermenting wine loses volume as gas escapes and foam forms. Keeping the cask full with reserved liquid limits contact with air, which can let spoilage microbes and oxidation spoil 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.

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