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White Currant Wine, Called English Champaign

A fermented wine made from white currants, sugar, and yeast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and white currant work together. They rank in the top 29% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 59 recipes. The science ↓

White Currant Wine, Called English Champaign

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the must

  1. Boil 6 gallons of water with 18 pounds of sugar for 30 minutes, skimming off the scum.

  2. Pour the boiling mixture over 2 gallons of picked white currants.

  3. When the mixture cools to the temperature of new milk, add good ale yeast to ferment.

  4. Allow it to ferment for 2 days.

Strain and bottle

  1. Strain through a flannel bag into a barrel.

  2. Once fermentation ceases, bottle the wine.

  3. Add a lump of double-refined sugar to each bottle.

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 curranttop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together59 recipes

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

What each ingredient does

Lisbon or loaf sugar
Provides the sweetness and the sugar that the yeast ferments into alcohol.
White currants
Supply the fruit flavour and acidity that give the wine its character.
Good ale yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, turning the liquid into wine.
Well-bruised isinglass
Fining agent that helps clarify the wine by collecting suspended particles.

The step that matters

Adding the yeast at the right temperature. Yeast works best within a moderate temperature range. Adding it while the must is still hot can kill it, so the mixture should cool to about the temperature of new milk before the yeast goes in.

“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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