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Drink

Lemon Wine

A fermented beverage made from lemons, brandy, water, sugar, and white wine, steeped and aged.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Lemon Wine

Why it works: Brandy and white wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 620 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Lemon Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the steeping mixture

  1. Pare the rinds off the lemons and cut the rinds.

  2. Squeeze out the juice.

  3. Steep the rinds in the lemon juice with the brandy in a closed earthen pot for 3 days.

Make the syrup

  1. Squeeze 6 more lemons.

  2. Mix their juice with the spring water and sugar.

  3. Boil the water, sugar, and lemon mixture together.

  4. Let it cool.

Blend, strain and age

  1. Add the white wine and the steeped lemons with brandy.

  2. Mix well.

  3. Strain the mixture through a linen bag into a vessel.

  4. Let it stand for 3 months.

  5. Bottle it, ensuring to cork and wire the bottles well.

  6. Store in a cool place or in sand.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Brandy + white winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together620 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Lemon + white winetop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,832 recipes

    Shared aroma: myrcene (balsamic, herbaceous).

  3. Lemon + sugartop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

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

  4. Brandy + sugartop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  5. Lemon + brandytop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,351 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

Lemon and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 53,532 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Lemons
Their rinds and juice supply the main lemon aroma and sharp acidity.
Brandy
Adds alcohol that extracts lemon oils from the rinds and helps preserve the wine.
Sugar
Sweetens the wine and balances the lemon's acidity.
White wine
Forms the wine base that the lemon and brandy flavours are blended into.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Apricotfits better
  2. Vanillafits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Lemonthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against brandy, 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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