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Ripe Grape Wine

A fermented beverage made from ripe grapes, water, and sugar, aged for 15 months.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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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 ↓

Ripe Grape Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the grapes

  1. Pick grapes from the stalks and slightly break them by hand.

  2. Let the grapes stand for three days.

  3. Press the grapes and draw off the liquor, washing any remaining flavor from the husks.

Ferment

  1. Add 2 pounds of strong sugar to each gallon of juice and water.

  2. Transfer the mixture into a cask to ferment, checking it once a week.

  3. When fermentation nearly subsides, rack it off and add 1 pound of sugar candy if needed.

  4. Bung the cask and let it stand for 15 months before bottling.

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. 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 juice, sugar source and flavor that the wine is built from.
Strong sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbonation-free dryness as it is consumed.
Water
Dilutes the juice to balance acidity and sweetness and sets the total volume.

The step that matters

Rack off after fermentation nearly subsides. Racking separates the wine from the sediment of dead yeast and solids, which otherwise can cause off flavors during long aging.

“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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