Skip to main content
Drink

Pink Champagne

A fermented beverage made from sugar, water, currants, yeast, and isinglass.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Red currant and white currant share more aroma than cooks usually use. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Pink Champagne

Ingredients

Directions

Make the liquid

  1. Boil the sugar in water for 30 minutes and skim well.

  2. Pour the hot liquid over the picked currants.

  3. When nearly cold, add the yeast and let it work for 2 days.

Strain and cask

  1. Strain through a fine sieve and transfer to a small cask with isinglass.

  2. Leave extra liquid to fill the cask as it works over.

  3. After 2 weeks, bung it up and let it stand until April.

Bottle and age

  1. Add a lump of sugar to each bottle before corking.

  2. Let the bottles stand uncorked for 1 day, then cork and wire them.

  3. Store bottles upright in the cellar, laying a few on their sides for a week before serving.

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. Red currant + white curranttop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + red curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,3-butanedione (butter, sweet).

  3. Sugar + white curranttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Lump sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and provides the sweetness of the finished drink.
Red currants
Give colour, fruit flavour and acidity to the pink wine.
White currants
Add fruit flavour and acidity to balance the sweetness.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, which gives the drink its sparkle.
Isinglass
Gathers suspended particles so they settle out, clearing the liquid.

The step that matters

Adding a lump of sugar to each bottle before corking. The sugar lets the yeast still present ferment again inside the sealed bottle, creating pressure that gives sparkle. Too much sugar can build enough pressure to break bottles, so the amount should be modest.

Swap the white currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, red currant):

  1. Raspberryfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Blueberryfits better
  4. White currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, red currant. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Black Currant CordialBlack Currant Cordial11 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipes