Skip to main content
Drink

Grape Wine

A homemade wine made from ripe white grapes, water, sugar, and egg whites, fermented and bottled with added sugar.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Sugar and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 21% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 122,807 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Grape Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the juice

  1. Remove grapes from stems and pound them to a pulp.

  2. Place the pulp in large stone jars and pour in half as much water as there are grapes.

  3. Cover and let stand overnight.

  4. Squeeze out and strain the juice.

Make the wine

  1. Mix sugar and egg whites into the juice and boil for a few moments, skimming off any foam.

  2. Let the mixture cool, then transfer it to a keg until fermentation is complete.

Bottle and store

  1. Bottle the wine, adding a lump of sugar to each bottle.

  2. Seal the corks and store in a cool place or bury in sawdust, turning occasionally.

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. Sugar + eggtop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  2. Grape + sugartop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together7,490 recipes

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

  3. Grape + eggtop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together4,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: (e)-2-octenal (fatty, green).

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

What each ingredient does

White grapes
Provide the juice and natural sugar that ferment into the wine.
White sugar
Feeds the yeast during fermentation and adds sweetness to the finished wine.
Egg whites
Bind and lift impurities and foam so they can be skimmed off during boiling.

The step that matters

Skimming off the foam while boiling. Egg whites and sugar are boiled into the juice, and foam rises as they coagulate and carry impurities to the surface. Removing it keeps the wine clearer and less cloudy.

Swap the grape

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

  1. Vanillafits better
  2. Raisinfits better
  3. Lemonfits better
  4. Grapethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against sugar, egg. 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 grape wine recipes

Unripe 3 See all 77 →

You might also like

Grape FrappeGrape Frappe10 recipesVegetable SoupVegetable Soup350 recipesRaspberry VinegarRaspberry Vinegar214 recipesBrown Coffee with EggBrown Coffee with Egg175 recipes