Name: Raspberry Wine
Ingredients: 1 quart ripe raspberries; 1 quart soft water; 3 pounds sugar; ⅓ cup brandy per bottle

Why it works: Sugar and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Raspberry Wine

Ingredients

1 quart ripe raspberries
1 quart soft water
3 pounds sugar
⅓ cup brandy per bottle

Directions

Make the wine

Mash the raspberries and mix with soft water.
Let the mixture stand for two days.
Strain the mixture.
Add 3 pounds of sugar for every gallon of liquid.

Bottle and finish

After two months, bottle the wine.
Add ⅓ cup of brandy to each bottle.

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.

Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Raspberries: Provide the fruit flavour and colour that define the wine.
Sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation and adds sweetness to the finished wine.
Brandy: Raises the alcohol content and adds warmth to each bottle.

“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.