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Wine From Unripe Grapes

A wine produced by fermenting unripe grapes 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: Grape and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,490 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Wine From Unripe Grapes

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Bruise the grapes in a large tub until every berry is mashed.

  2. Add 4 gallons of cold spring water and mix well by hand to separate juice from solids.

  3. Cover the tub and let it stand for 24 hours.

  4. Strain through a coarse bag and squeeze the fruit dry.

  5. Pour 1 gallon of water over the solids to extract remaining juice.

Make the must

  1. In a separate container, dissolve 30 lbs of loaf sugar in the strained liquid.

  2. Add water to make a total of 103 gallons of liquid, called the must.

  3. Cover the vessel with a board and a blanket, and let it sit at a moderate temperature for 24 hours or until fermentation begins.

  4. Transfer the must into a cask, keeping it full to the bung-hole and slightly inclined.

Ferment and age

  1. Loosen the wooden peg in the bung hole after a day or two to allow gas to escape, repeating until fermentation slows.

  2. Seal the bung tightly with brown paper.

  3. Store the wine in a cool cellar until a clear warm day in January, then rack it off and let it stand until the end of March 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. Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,490 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

Unripe grapes
Provide the juice that becomes the wine and supply its fruit flavour.
Loaf sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation, producing alcohol and setting the wine's sweetness.

The step that matters

Loosening the bung to release gas. Fermentation gives off carbon dioxide. If the cask stays sealed while gas builds, pressure can force out the bung or split the cask, so the peg must be eased and checked as fermentation slows.

“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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