Skip to main content
Drink

Red Currant Wine

A fermented wine made from currants, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Currant and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 26% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 12,256 recipes. The science ↓

Red Currant Wine

Oven, in the book's wordsA cool oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick fine ripe currants from the stalks and bruise them with a wooden mallet in a large pan.

  2. Let the currants stand to ferment for 24 hours.

  3. Strain the liquor through a fine sieve.

Ferment

  1. For each gallon of liquor, add 2 gallons of water and 6 pounds of loaf sugar.

  2. Allow the mixture to ferment without yeast until fermentation has ceased.

  3. Do not seal the barrel until fermentation is complete.

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

Currant and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 12,256 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

Fine ripe currants
Supply the juice, acidity and fruit flavour that the wine is built on.
Loaf sugar
Feeds fermentation to produce alcohol, and any sugar left over adds sweetness.

The step that matters

Do not seal the barrel until fermentation is complete. Active fermentation releases carbon dioxide. Sealing the barrel early traps the gas, which can build pressure and force the bung out or spoil the 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.

You might also like

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