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Red Currant Wine

Red currant wine made by fermenting fresh-picked currants with water and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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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

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Pour 4 gallons of water over fresh-picked currants, well broken by hand, and let it stand for 24 hours.

  2. Strain and press the currants, then add 4 pounds of loaf sugar for every gallon of liquid.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Let the sugar dissolve, then transfer the liquid to a cask, stirring daily until fermentation subsides.

  2. Close the cask and bottle the wine in 3 months.

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

Fresh-picked currants
Provide the fruit flavour, natural acidity and the sugars and yeast-bearing skins that start fermentation.
Loaf sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide, and adds sweetness.

The step that matters

Stir daily until fermentation subsides. Stirring keeps the sugar and yeast evenly mixed so fermentation proceeds consistently. Closing the cask before fermentation has finished can trap gas and build pressure.

“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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