recipe no. 7: mulled wine

i love wine. i love wine so much that i forced alex into liking it. and now he loves it! a win(e) for all.

we live in chicago, and if you've ever been to chicago around christmastime you probably know about the christkindlmarket - the german outdoor market that pitches every year in daley plaza (and now in wrigleyville as well). their mulled wine is infamous, and every christmastime i wonder how i can make it and make it close to as good. last year i bought mulling spices tea bags that i found at whole foods, and it was very disappointing to say the least. i wanted to make mulled wine for the blog because i wanted something to hold me accountable for figuring out how to make it good, and i also just love having this drink around this time of year. So below you can find the recipe i started from, which is at hyggeandwest.com. from there, i just tinkered around a bit and looked at some additional recipes, so i'll include my findings as well (so science).

quick side note - there seems to be no clear consensus about what kind of wine to use for this, and we just have a weird corner store close to our house so i did my best with what i could get. the recipe i found says to use a kind of wine called beaujolais nouveau, but our corner store definitely didn't sell this so i did some googling and found that pinot noir was pretty close. that's what we used.

what you'll need:

• 1 bottle of red wine

• 4 cinnamon sticks

• 2 cardamom pods (i just dumped a smallish amount of cardamom seeds in, i couldn't find the pods)

• 5 whole cloves (i used about 15-20 little clove sticks, i don't know what whole cloves look like)

• sugar (i used sugar in the raw)

• orange zest (i used four pieces the length of the orange, and about 1/2 inch thick, but add to taste)

what you'll do:

• put all the ingredients in a large saucepan and heat on low heat until pretty warm to the touch, about 15 minutes

• don't boil the wine

• taste it!

• i added a... generous amount of sugar. i just kept putting in probably about half a tablespoon, stirring it, tasting it, and going from there.

• i also added about 300 mL of water, because the wine was tasting pretty acidic. again, i just kept tasting it.

• i also squirted orange juice from my fresh orange into it

• ladle the wine into cups, straining as necessary

• i did add some whisky, and was not disappointed so i would recommend that as well.