Skip to main content
Drink

Excellent Ginger Wine

A fermented beverage made from ginger, sugar, water, lemon, and yeast.

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

Why it works: Ginger and lemon match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 5% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,154 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Excellent Ginger Wine

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Prepare the ginger

  1. Peel and slice the ginger.

  2. Boil the ginger in water for 30 minutes.

  3. Strain the liquid into a clean container.

Make the must

  1. Add sugar and stir until dissolved.

  2. Squeeze in the juice of the lemon and add the lemon peel.

  3. Allow to cool to room temperature, then add yeast.

Ferment and age

  1. Cover and let ferment for 2 weeks, stirring daily.

  2. Bottle and seal, then let age for at least 1 month before serving.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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. Ginger + lemontop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,154 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Ginger + sugartop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together14,054 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Sugar + lemontop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together53,532 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Ginger and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 14,054 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

Fresh ginger
Supplies the main aroma and pungent flavour that defines the wine.
Sugar
Provides the sweetness and the food for yeast to turn into alcohol during fermentation.
Yeast
Ferments the sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide, turning the liquid into wine.
Lemon
Adds acidity and brightness that balance the sweetness and support a clean flavour.

The step that matters

Allow to cool to room temperature before adding yeast. Yeast is killed or stressed by hot liquid, so adding it too early can stop fermentation before it starts. Cooling first lets the yeast survive and begin converting sugar into alcohol.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Orangefits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Vanillafits less well

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

You might also like

Lemon WheyLemon Whey33 recipesLemon WineLemon Wine31 recipesGinger PopGinger Pop22 recipesGinger BeerGinger Beer11 recipes