Name: Grape Wine
Ingredients: 20 pounds very ripe grapes, picked clean; 6 quarts boiling water; 10 pounds sugar

Why it works: Grape and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,490 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Grape Wine

Ingredients

20 pounds very ripe grapes, picked clean
6 quarts boiling water
10 pounds sugar

Directions

Prepare the must

Pour boiling water over the grapes in a large container.
Cover and let the mixture cool, then break the grapes with your hands.
Let it stand for three days.
Strain the mixture as dry as possible.

Ferment

Stir in the sugar until dissolved.
Transfer to a fermentation vessel the next day and cover with a bung until fermentation stops.

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.

Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together7,490 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

Grapes: Provide the fruit, juice and natural yeasts that drive the fermentation.
Sugar: Feeds the yeast, which converts it into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Boiling water: Softens the grapes and helps draw out their juice and flavour.

“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.