Skip to main content
Drink

Wine Vinegar

A fermented liquid made from raisins, water, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Wine Vinegar

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the mash

  1. Drain the raisins from the liquor and lay them in a tub to heat for 3-4 days.

  2. Add 15 gallons of water for every 100 weight of raisins.

  3. Beat and stir the mash well for 48 hours.

  4. Strain the mixture and press it in a hair bag.

Ferment

  1. Put the liquid into a barrel with a toast covered in yeast.

  2. Ensure the cask is full and set it over a tub to ferment.

  3. When fermentation stops, cover the bung-hole with a piece of slate.

  4. Keep the barrel in a warm place.

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

What each ingredient does

Raisins
Provide the sugars that yeast ferments into alcohol, which then turns into vinegar.
Yeast
Converts the sugars in the liquid into alcohol to start the fermentation.

The step that matters

Keep the cask full during fermentation. A full barrel limits the air contact that would let the liquid over-oxidise unevenly and spoil. Keeping the vessel topped up protects the batch while fermentation runs.

“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.

You might also like

Vegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipesBlackberry CordialBlackberry Cordial129 recipes