Name: Raspberry Wine
Ingredients: 2 quarts raspberries; 1 pound double-refined sugar; 2 quarts white wine

Why it works: Sugar and white wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 30% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,586 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Raspberry Wine

Ingredients

2 quarts raspberries
1 pound double-refined sugar
2 quarts white wine

Directions

Prepare the juice

Bruise the raspberries with a spoon.
Strain the raspberries through a flannel bag into a stone jar.
Add 1 pound of sugar to each quart of juice and stir well.

Steep and bottle

Cover the jar and let it stand for three days.
Pour off the clear liquid.
Add 2 quarts of white wine and bottle it off.

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.

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

Raspberries: Provide the flavour and colour of the juice that forms the base of the wine.
Double-refined sugar: Sweetens the juice and feeds the fermentation that turns it into wine.
White wine: Adds liquid and body, diluting the raspberry juice into a drinkable 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.