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Excellent Raisin Wine

A fermented raisin wine made with spring water, raisins, and brandy, aged for several years.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Raisin and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 13% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,768 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Excellent Raisin Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Ferment the raisins

  1. In a large tub, combine the spring water and raisins.

  2. Stir the mixture thoroughly every day for a month.

  3. After a month, press the raisins in a horse-hair bag until as dry as possible.

  4. Transfer the liquid into a cask and wait until it stops hissing.

Age in the cask

  1. Add the bottle of brandy and seal the cask tightly for twelve months.

  2. After twelve months, rack off the liquid without the dregs.

  3. Filter the dregs through a flannel bag and add the clear liquid back to the cask.

  4. Pour in one or two quarts of brandy, depending on the size of the vessel, and seal it again.

Bottle or serve

  1. After three years, you can either bottle the wine or drink it directly from the cask.

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. Raisin + brandytop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,768 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

Raisins
Provide the sugar that yeast ferments into alcohol, along with the wine's fruity flavor.
Brandy
Raises the alcohol content, which helps preserve the wine during long aging.

The step that matters

Wait until the hissing stops before sealing the cask. Hissing is carbon dioxide from active fermentation. Sealing the cask while fermentation is still running can build pressure that may burst the cask or spoil the 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.

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