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Damson Wine, Ordinary

A fermented wine made from damsons, water, sugar, and brandy, aged for a year.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and brandy are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 19% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 11,939 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Damson Wine, Ordinary

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Reject any mouldy fruit and remove the stalks.

Ferment

  1. Boil the water and add it to the damsons, stirring daily for 4-5 days.

Sweeten, fortify and age

  1. Dissolve the sugar in the mixture and then transfer it to a cask.

  2. Add the bottle of brandy to the cask.

  3. Let it age in the cask for 1 year and then bottle for another year.

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

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

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

Damsons
Provide the fruit flavour, colour and the natural sugars that yeast ferments into alcohol.
Sugar
Feeds fermentation to produce alcohol and balances the tartness of the fruit with sweetness.
Brandy
Raises the alcohol content, which helps preserve the wine and adds warmth and aroma.

The step that matters

Reject mouldy fruit and remove the stalks. Mould on damsons can introduce off-flavours and unwanted microbes into the must, which may spoil the wine during fermentation and ageing. Removing the stalks keeps bitter, woody flavours out of the finished wine.

“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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