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Blackberry Wine

A fermented blackberry beverage made by boiling berries, adding sugar, fermenting, clarifying with isinglass, and storing.

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

Blackberry Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and ferment

  1. Place ripe blackberries in a large wooden or stone vessel with a spigot.

  2. Pour boiling water over the berries until covered.

  3. Once cool enough, bruise the berries with your hands until broken.

  4. Cover the vessel and let sit for 3–4 days until the berries rise to the top.

  5. Draw off the clear liquid into another vessel.

  6. Add 1 pound of sugar for every 10 quarts of liquid and stir well.

  7. Let the mixture ferment for 1–10 days in a similar vessel.

  8. Strain the liquid through a jelly bag into a large vessel.

Clarify and store

  1. Soak 4 ounces of isinglass in 1 pint of white wine for 12 hours.

  2. Boil the isinglass until dissolved.

  3. Combine 1 gallon of blackberry juice with the dissolved isinglass and boil together.

  4. Pour everything into the vessel and let it sit for a few days to settle.

  5. Draw off the clarified liquid and store in a cool 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

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. 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

Ripe blackberries
Provide the fruit flavor and the juice that becomes the wine.
Sugar
Sweetens the juice and feeds the yeast that produces alcohol during fermentation.
Isinglass
A fining agent that gathers suspended particles so the wine clears as it settles.

The step that matters

Dissolving the isinglass fully. Isinglass only clears the wine if it is completely dissolved before being combined with the juice. Undissolved pieces will not spread through the liquid, so haze and particles remain and the wine settles unevenly.

“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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