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Drink

Grape Wine

A fermented grape beverage made by crushing grapes, adding sugar, and aging with toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Grape and bread work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and 131 recipes mention both. Both carry (e)-2-octenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

The recipe

Ingredients

Contains: wheat (auto-detected from the ingredients and method; we can miss things, so check labels)

Directions

Prepare the must

  1. Crush the grapes and cover them with water.

  2. Let the mixture stand for 2 weeks covered with cheesecloth.

  3. Transfer the mixture into a cask.

Age and bottle

  1. For each gallon of juice, add 3 pounds of sugar.

  2. Add a piece of toasted bread and let it stand for 6 months.

  3. After 6 months, 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 aroma chemistry they share, and how many recipes mention both.

  1. Grape + breadtop 9% of all pairs
    Aroma overlapmoderate
    Mentioned together131 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

  2. Grape + sugartop 12% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together7,449 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  3. Sugar + breadtop 20% of all pairs
    Aroma overlaplow
    Mentioned together8,541 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

Grapes
Provide the juice and natural yeasts that ferment into wine.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast to produce alcohol during fermentation.

The step that matters

Covering the mixture with cheesecloth during the 2-week stand. The cloth lets air in while keeping fruit flies and dust out, so the mash can ferment safely without being contaminated by spoilage microbes.

“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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