Name: Blackberry Wine
Ingredients: boiling water; blackberries; 2 pounds sugar for every gallon of liquor; ½ ounce isinglass for every 3 gallons of wine

Blackberry Wine

A fermented blackberry wine made by steeping berries in boiling water, sweetening with sugar, clarifying with isinglass, and allowing to age.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription

From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients

Why it works: Sugar and wine are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 9,581 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Blackberry Wine

Ingredients

boiling water
blackberries
2 pounds sugar for every gallon of liquor
½ ounce isinglass for every 3 gallons of wine

Directions

Prepare the juice

Pour boiling water over the blackberries and let cool.
Bruise the fruit and let it stand until the berries rise to the top.
Drain off the clear liquid and measure it.

Ferment and clarify

Add 2 pounds of sugar for every gallon of liquid and stir well.
Let it stand open for a week or ten days.
Draw off the wine and strain it through a jelly bag.
Dissolve ½ ounce of isinglass in a little of the wine for every 3 gallons and mix it through the whole.

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 + winetop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together9,581 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Blackberries: Provide the juice, flavour and natural acidity that make up the wine.
Sugar: Provides sweetness and feeds the fermentation that turns it into wine.
Isinglass: Fining agent that binds haze particles so the wine settles and clears.

“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.