Name: Wild Grape Wine
Ingredients: 1 gallon grapes; 1 gallon boiling water; 4 pounds white sugar

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 ↓

Wild Grape Wine

Ingredients

1 gallon grapes
1 gallon boiling water
4 pounds white sugar

Directions

Prepare the must

Remove grapes from the stem and bruise them.
Pour boiling water over the grapes and let it stand for one week without stirring.

Ferment

Strain the mixture and add 4 pounds of white sugar for each gallon of juice.
Transfer to a wide-mouth stone jar and let it ferment.

Bottle and age

After fermentation, strain again and bottle the wine.
For clearer wine, filter before bottling.
The wine improves with age.

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.

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, flavor, and the natural yeasts that start fermentation.
White sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and adding sweetness to the finished 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.