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Wine From Grape Leaves

Wine made by steeping grape leaves, mixing with spirit and sugar, and optionally sparkling.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Grape and spirit work together. They rank in the top 20% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 28 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Wine From Grape Leaves

Ingredients

Directions

Make the liquid

  1. Steam 6 bushels of grape leaves in a box made of oak planks with a copper bottom over a furnace.

  2. Mix the resulting decoction with ⅓ barrel of spirit and 1 to 2 pounds of sugar per gallon of liquid.

Bottle

  1. To make sparkling wine, bottle before fermentation ceases and add a small piece of rock candy 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.

  1. Grape + spirittop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together28 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,490 recipes

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

  3. Spirit + sugartop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 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

Grape leaves
Supply the flavour and aroma that are extracted into the liquid during steaming.
Spirit
Raises the alcohol content, adding strength and helping to preserve the wine.
Sugar
Feeds yeast fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide, and adds sweetness.

The step that matters

Bottling before fermentation ceases. Yeast keeps fermenting and releasing carbon dioxide after bottling. Bottling too early, or adding rock candy to a wine that is still active, can build pressure that may burst bottles. Bottling at the right point controls carbonation.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Orangefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against spirit, sugar. 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.

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