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Apricot Wine

A fermented beverage made from apricots, sugar, water, yeast, and white wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Apricot and white wine work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 106 recipes. Both carry ethyl isobutyrate, which smells fruity, ethereal. The science ↓

Apricot Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the must

  1. Boil the apricots and sugar in water for 30 minutes.

  2. Strain the mixture into a pan and add the apricot kernels.

  3. Cover the vessel and let the liquid cool.

  4. Mix in the brewer's yeast and let it ferment for 3 to 4 days.

Age and bottle

  1. Pour the clear liquid into a clean cask and let fermentation finish.

  2. Add the white wine and close the cask for 6 months.

  3. Decant into bottles and store for an additional year before using.

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. Apricot + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together106 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl isobutyrate (fruity, ethereal).

  2. Apricot + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,630 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Sugar + white winetop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,586 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

Apricots
Supply the fruit flavor, aroma and sugars that the yeast ferments into wine.
Sugar
Provides the sugar that yeast converts to alcohol during fermentation.
Brewer's yeast
Ferments the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, turning the liquid into wine.
White wine
Adds extra body and a wine character to the finished drink.

The step that matters

Strain and cool before adding yeast. Yeast is killed or stressed by hot liquid, so the mixture must cool before the yeast goes in. Keeping the vessel covered during cooling limits contamination by wild microbes that could spoil the wine.

Swap the apricot

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Plumfits about as well
  4. Apricotthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, white wine. 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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