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Currant Wine

Currant wine made by fermenting currants in water, sweetening with sugar, and adding spirit.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Spirit and wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 701 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Currant Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the must

  1. Bruise the currants and add them to the water.

  2. Let the mixture ferment in a tub for 24 hours.

  3. Strain the mixture through a fine sieve without pressing it.

  4. Stir in the sugar until fully dissolved.

Fortify and age

  1. Add the spirit of wine to the mixture.

  2. Let it stand for six weeks, then bottle it.

  3. If the wine is not clear, transfer it to other bottles and let it stand for two weeks before racking it off into smaller bottles.

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. Spirit + winetop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together701 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

  2. Currant + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  3. Currant + spirittop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together34 recipes
  4. Sugar + spirittop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together602 recipes

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

  5. Sugar + curranttop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together12,256 recipes

Sugar and currant 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

White sugar
Provides sweetness and feeds the fermentation that produces alcohol.
Ripe currants
Supply the fruit flavour, acidity and natural sugars for fermentation.
Rectified spirit of wine
Raises the alcohol content, stopping fermentation and helping the wine keep.

The step that matters

Straining without pressing. Pressing the fruit forces solids and bitter, cloudy compounds into the liquid, making the wine harder to clarify. Letting it drain naturally keeps the wine clearer.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (sugar, spirit, wine):

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Applefits better
  3. Orangefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, spirit, wine. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

More currant wine recipes

Black 28Red 22Sauce 9White 8 See all 158 →

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