Name: Blackberry Wine
Ingredients: 1 quart boiling water for each gallon of blackberries; 2 cups sugar; 1 pint rye whiskey or 1 pint best alcohol

Why it works: Sugar and rye work together. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 535 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Blackberry Wine

Ingredients

1 quart boiling water for each gallon of blackberries
2 cups sugar
1 pint rye whiskey or 1 pint best alcohol

Directions

Prepare the juice

Mash the blackberries.
Pour 1 quart of boiling water over the mashed berries for each gallon.
Let the mixture stand for 24 hours, stirring occasionally.
Strain the mixture and measure it into a keg.

Add sugar and spirit

Add 2 cups of sugar and 1 pint of rye whiskey or 1 pint of best alcohol for each gallon.

Age

Cork tightly and let it stand until the following October.

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.

Sugar + ryetop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together535 recipes

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

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Blackberries: Provide the fruit, juice and flavor that make up the wine.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and feeds the fermentation that turns the juice into wine.
Rye whiskey or best alcohol: Raises the alcohol content, helping preserve the wine and adding warmth.

“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.