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Drink

Black Currant Wine

A fermented beverage made from black currants, water, and sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Black currant and sugar work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry 1-penten-3-one, which smells fish, pungent. The science ↓

Black Currant Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Pick the currants and measure them.

  2. For every 4 quarts of currants, add 1 quart of water.

  3. Break the currants and stir in the measured water.

  4. Let the mixture stand for 3 days.

  5. Squeeze out the juice.

Ferment and bottle

  1. Add 1 pound of sugar for each quart of juice.

  2. Transfer to a vessel and let it ferment, reserving some liquid to top off daily until clear.

  3. After 5 months, draw off the wine and bottle it.

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. Black currant + sugartop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together393 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

Black currants
Supply the juice, flavor and acidity that the wine is built on.
Sugar
Feeds the fermentation, producing alcohol and balancing the fruit's tartness.

The step that matters

Topping off the fermenting wine daily. Keeping the vessel full limits the wine's exposure to air. Air allows spoilage microbes and oxidation to take hold, which can sour or dull the wine while it 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.

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