Skip to main content
Drink

Currant Wine

Currant wine is made by fermenting ripe currants with water, sweetening with sugar, adding brandy, and aging for a year.

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

Why it works: Currant and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 3,057 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Currant Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the must

  1. Mash the ripe currants with your hands.

  2. Add 3 pints of water to the currant pulp and mix well.

  3. Let the mixture stand until fermentation is complete.

  4. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve.

Sweeten and cask

  1. For every gallon of liquid, add 3 pounds of sugar and stir until dissolved.

  2. Transfer the liquid to a cask and add a little dissolved isinglass.

  3. For every 10 gallons, add 1 pint of brandy.

  4. Seal the cask and let it age for one year 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. Currant + brandytop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3,057 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Sugar + brandytop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together11,939 recipes

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

  3. Currant + sugartop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and brandy barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 11,939 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

Currants
Provide the fruit flavour, acidity and the sugars that ferment into wine.
Sugar
Feeds fermentation and adds sweetness to balance the tart currant juice.
Brandy
Raises the alcohol content and helps keep the wine stable during ageing.
Isinglass
Fines the wine, helping suspended particles settle so it clears.

The step that matters

Let the mixture stand until fermentation is complete. Yeast must convert the sugar into alcohol fully before the liquid is strained and sweetened. Stopping early leaves sugar that can restart fermentation later in the cask, which may build pressure or spoil the wine.

Swap the currant

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Apricotfits better
  3. Raisinfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, brandy. 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.

More currant wine recipes

Black 28Red 22Sauce 9White 8 See all 158 →

You might also like

Black Currant CordialBlack Currant Cordial11 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipes