Name: Black Currant Wine
Ingredients: 20 pounds black currants; 2 to 4 pounds brandy; 12 to 14 gallons water; 2 tablespoons yeast

Why it works: Black currant and brandy work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 55 recipes. Both carry ethyl butyrate, which smells apple, fruity. The science ↓

Black Currant Wine

Ingredients

20 pounds black currants
2 to 4 pounds brandy
12 to 14 gallons water
2 tablespoons yeast

Directions

Make the wine

Crush the black currants and combine with water in a large container.
Add the brandy and yeast, then stir well.
Cover and let the mixture ferment for 8 days.

Bottle

After fermentation, bottle the wine and cork it tightly.

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.

Black currant + brandytop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together55 recipes

Shared aroma: ethyl butyrate (apple, fruity).

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

What each ingredient does

Black currants: Provide the fruit flavor, sugars for fermentation, and most of the wine's body.
Yeast: Converts the fruit sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide during fermentation.
Brandy: Adds alcohol strength and warmth, helping preserve 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.