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Drink

White Champagne

A fermented gooseberry wine made with water, sugar, and brandy.

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 ↓

White Champagne

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pour 3 quarts of water over 1 gallon of well-macerated gooseberries.

  2. Let the mixture stand for a week.

  3. Strain the mixture through a sieve.

  4. Add 4 pounds of sugar to every gallon of the liquid.

Ferment

  1. Allow fermentation to occur for several days.

  2. Pass the liquid through a jelly bag into a cask.

  3. Leave the cask open until fermentation nearly subsides.

  4. Bung the cask.

Age and bottle

  1. Add a small quantity of brandy.

  2. Let the wine remain for 12 months.

  3. Bottle the wine.

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

Gooseberries
Provide the fruit flavour and the sugar-bearing juice that ferments into the wine.
Sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide, and adds sweetness.
Brandy
Added in small amount after fermentation to raise the alcohol content and strengthen 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.

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