Name: Grape Wine
Ingredients: 20 pounds ripe tame grapes; 6 quarts boiling soft water; 10 pounds granulated sugar

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 ↓

Grape Wine

Ingredients

20 pounds ripe tame grapes
6 quarts boiling soft water
10 pounds granulated sugar

Directions

Prepare the must

Place the grapes in a stone jar.
Pour boiling water over them.
Squeeze the grapes thoroughly by hand.
Cover with a cloth.
Let sit for three days.
Squeeze out the juice.
Add the sugar.
Let the mixture sit for one more week.
Remove the scum.

Bottle and age

Strain into a bottle.
Leave a vent until fermentation is complete.
Strain again.
Seal the bottles.
Store them on their side 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.

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

Ripe tame grapes: Provide the juice, sugar and flavor that ferment into the wine.
Granulated sugar: Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide.
Soft water: Makes up the liquid base and helps extract juice from the grapes.

“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.