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Black Currant Wine

A fermented beverage made from black currants, water, and crushed 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 ↓

Black Currant Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Place the currants in an open vessel and cover them with water, noting the amount.

  2. Mash every berry with a pestle or pounder and let them stand for 24 hours to dissolve the pulp.

  3. Transfer the mixture into a coarse bag and apply pressure to extract the juice.

Make the must

  1. Measure the juice and add 2 gallons of water for every gallon of juice, including the initial water.

  2. Add 4 pounds of crushed sugar for every gallon of the mixture.

  3. Pour the mixture into a cask, reserving some to top off during fermentation.

Ferment and age

  1. Store the cask in a moderately cool, dry room to ferment, topping off as needed.

  2. Once fermentation has stopped, seal the cask for 9 months before bottling.

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

Currants
Provide the main flavour, acidity and fruit sugars that the wine is built on.
Crushed sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and carbon dioxide, and adds sweetness to the finished wine.

The step that matters

Topping off the cask during fermentation. Keeping the cask full limits contact with air, which can allow vinegar-producing bacteria and oxidation to spoil the wine. Reserved mixture should be added as the level drops while fermentation is active.

“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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