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Drink

Grape Juice or Sweet Wine

A beverage made by boiling grapes, straining the juice, and optionally sweetening with sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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 Juice or Sweet Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the grapes

  1. Wash and remove stems from the grapes.

  2. Crush the grapes and cover them with cold water, similar to making jelly.

  3. Bring the mixture to a boil.

Strain and sweeten

  1. Strain the juice through a jelly bag and return it to the stove.

  2. Add ½ cup sugar for each gallon of juice (optional).

  3. Heat the juice again to boiling.

Bottle

  1. Bottle or seal the juice in boiling hot jars or bottles.

  2. If using corks, be sure to boil them.

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. 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

Grapes
Provide the juice and flavor that make up the drink.
Sugar
Adds sweetness to balance the tart grape juice.
Cold water
Covers the crushed grapes to extract their juice, as in jelly making.

The step that matters

Bottle the juice in boiling hot jars. Heating the juice and containers to boiling helps reduce microorganisms that could spoil the juice, so the jars should be filled while hot and the corks boiled before use.

“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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