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Red Currant Wine

A fermented beverage made by bruising red currants, adding sugar, and aging in a cask.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Red currant and brandy work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 105 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, pear. The science ↓

Red Currant Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Bruise the currants well and let them stand overnight.

  2. Mash the currants with your hands, then strain through a fine sieve.

  3. Add 4 pounds of sugar to every gallon of the liquid.

Cask and fermentation

  1. Rinse the cask well with brandy.

  2. Strain the liquid again into it.

  3. Check if the sugar is dissolved.

  4. Lay the bung lightly on the cask.

  5. Seal it after 10 days.

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 + brandytop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together105 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  3. Red currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,156 recipes

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

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

Red currants
Provide the fruit flesh and natural acidity that give the wine its body and tartness.
Sugar
Feeds fermentation and adds sweetness, balancing the tart currant juice.
Water
Dilutes the juice to a drinkable strength and carries the sugar through the fermentation.

The step that matters

Check if the sugar is dissolved.. Undissolved sugar sinks and ferments unevenly, so the wine can end up with uneven sweetness and strength. Stirring until clear before sealing helps yeast work across the whole batch.

Swap the red currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Red currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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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