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A Toast to Christmas: Mulled Wine

Warm yourself up with the essence of a German Christmas Market, thrown into a mug of festive fever

By Helena Parker, Food & Drink Editor (2012/13) Wednesday 21 November 2012

Photo Credit: Alex Watkins

I know it’s not December yet. I know the snow has yet to fall on the roofs of York. I know I’m probably getting ahead of myself in saying this but I’m going to say it anyway: I love Christmas. The festive season for me is all about the fantastic smells that you don’t get at any other time: the brandy butter, the perfume my grandmother only wears once a year, the dusty trunk of decorations dragged down from the attic and deposited with gleeful abandon and deliberate lack of taste all over the aesthetically pleasing tree my sister has painstakingly arranged. But the best smell of Christmas for me is the aroma, the waft, the tendril of spicy scent that sneaks into my consciousness and tells me one deliciously overwhelming and mind-boggling fact: someone in the vicinity is making mulled wine.

The origins of mulled wine are shrouded in the mists of time and alcoholism, but experts generally agree that its source is in Northern medieval Europe when it was used for, ahem, ‘medicinal’ purposes, or as an improvement for a bad batch of wine. Sneaky. Interestingly, it is also responsible for the idea of “drinking to your health”; as the Romans shivered in lands far away from sunny Rome they drank mulled wine in an attempt to prevent the cold from seeping beneath their armour. In my book it very much still possesses these medicinal purposes, for what could be better than the combination of a hot sweet drink and alcohol in one scrumptious concoction?

“Abandon too tight and now very chilly lederhosen, and take on something more respectable; a glass of steaming gluhwein, spiced to high heaven and oozing warming essence of Christmas into your steadily freezing brain

htt”p://nouse.co.uk/2012/11/21/a-toast-to-christmas-mulled-wine Archived 11 Dec 2018 04:18:59 Nouse Web Archives A Toast to Christmas: Mulled Wine Page 2 of 4 ” Allow me to take you on a brief tour of Europe and present you with a few variations. While the basis of mulled wine is essentially red wine, sugar, cinnamon, cloves and orange juice, there are a number of variants. The Germans, as usual, never do things by halves and give you the option of your gluhwein ‘mit schuss’; literally ‘with a shot’. Oh hello, Willow. The Scandinavians call their version Gløgg or Glögi, which has the added delights of brandy (or vodka), raisins, almonds and figs in it, plus a few cardamom pods to give that extra spice. Moldova certainly has the most bizarre combination: hot red wine with honey and black pepper. Try it if you dare. The Victorians had their version too and gave it a posh name so they could pretend it wasn’t German; the Smoking Bishop, which adds a dash of frightfully upper class Victorian port to the mix. Such fun.

I think it is fair to say that, as with most alcohol, no one does it quite like Germany. Oktoberfest is over for another year and everyone stands around in lederhosen suddenly feeling a little bit silly. How to move on from here? Solution: Abandon too tight and now very chilly lederhosen, and take on something more respectable; a glass of steaming gluhwein, spiced to high heaven and oozing warming essence of Christmas into your steadily freezing brain. Hence I will stick to the method of the German Christmas markets and try to give you a recipe for yumminess. Should you feel the need to branch out into black pepper and whatnot, please, be my guest, but don’t come running to me when you swallow a peppercorn.

The glorious key factor here is cheap wine. You are not going to taste the difference between Asda own- brand merlot and your dad’s best pinot noir in this because, once you add sugar and heat it up, the wine is more a background base for all the other flavours piled on top. It is best to use cinnamon sticks if you can, but ground cinnamon also has the desired effect.

You may think I’m exaggerating when I say it’s superb. And yet, why drink luke-warm, watery, non- alcoholic hot chocolate after a chilly cycle ride back from campus, when you could already be on the pre- drinks? Two birds, one stone, baby. (Having said that, hot chocolate with Baileys is a whole other story. Watch this space.)

Gluhwein

1 bottle red wine 1/2 pint water 4-5 tbsp caster sugar 5 cloves 1 stick cinnamon or 1tsp ground cinnamon Juice of 1 orange

Put the water, orange juice and spices into a pan and heat gently. Add sugar and dissolve, not boiling. Add wine and heat until it starts to steam. It is unwise to boil the wine, not only because you lose some precious alcohol, but also because it can give a slightly bitter, dry taste to the drink. Pass through a sieve, making sure you fish out any rogue cloves and cinnamon sticks, and serve in wine glasses. Or whatever receptacle you happen to have available at the time. Swig smugly by yourself for a while and wait for your friends to flood into the kitchen looking hopeful. Bring on winter. You can serve it with thin slices of http://nouse.co.uk/2012/11/21/a-toast-to-christmas-mulled-wine Archived 11 Dec 2018 04:18:59 Nouse Web Archives A Toast to Christmas: Mulled Wine Page 3 of 4 orange in the drink to add a bit of extra flavour, or if you’re feeling really creative some orange peel on the side.

Tip: If you put a metal spoon into the wine glass before you pour in the hot liquid, it usually stops it from cracking. Also depending on how awful your wine is, you can improve by using soft light brown sugar instead of caster for a sweeter taste to counter the vinegar levels of your wine, or even muscovado sugar which is syrupy and dark and will taste much sweeter and distract from the poorness of Aldi’s not-so-fine.