Mulling Season Begins
Get an early start on your holiday drink-making
We’ve officially entered the fall season. Whether you define it astronomically (September 23), meteorologically (September 1), Labor-Day-ically (September 4), East Asian lunisolar-ically (August 8), or Celtic lunisolar-ically (August 1), pretty much everyone in the Northern hemisphere agrees that we’re in it at this point.
When I think of fall, I picture a gigantic, orange-red harvest moon rising over a chilly field, illuminating the work to reap a few final patches of crops. I also imagine the warm celebrations of an ensuing harvest festival, held around a roaring fire with plenty of food and drink.
If you’re looking to hold a harvest festival of your own, but you want to go a bit lighter on the harvesting part and heavier on the festival part, it’s never too early in the season to start brewing some mulled wine. Sure, it’s most traditionally drunk around the Christmas holidays, but I firmly believe you can start drinking it whenever it gets cold enough outside to merit it.
Mulled wine
Mulled wine is simple: just mulling spices, wine, and some sweetener. However, it can sometimes be tempting to over-complicate it.
When I first started making mulled wine, I followed a tip I’d read that insisted on toasting the mulling spices in a pan before adding in the wine. I did this far too many times before realizing that it was adding unnecessary time and complexity — all in service of lending a rather unappealing toasted note to the drink. Don’t trust anyone who wants to make this process more complicated than it should be, and don’t toast your spices.
Now that we’ve dodged the toasting issue, there’s one more element we need to dodge: star anise. Far too many mulling spice mixes include it, and many of them are chock full of it. I think anise has its place (specifically, in anise-flavored liqueur and Springerle cookies), but it can absolutely ruin mulled wine by drowning out both the other spices and the flavor of the wine itself.
I used to individually pick out the star anise seeds from whatever spice mix I was using, but now I just buy Oaktown Spice Shop’s delightfully anise-free (and very high-quality) Mulling Spices. It’s got cinnamon, ginger, allspice, cardamom, and cloves — mulling perfection in a bottle. They know what they’re doing over there, and it makes for a fantastic mulled wine.
Mulled Wine
750ml dry red wine (I recommend a young Cabernet or Bordeaux blend)
1 spice bag filled with a few spoonfuls of mulling spices (I recommend Oaktown Spice Shop)
¼ to ½ cup honey (depending on how sweet you prefer it)
Set the spice bag in a cooking pot and pour the red wine over it. Add honey. Simmer for about 30 minutes over very low heat, stirring occasionally. Remove the spice bag and serve piping hot in a sturdy mug.
☞ Alan Joyce / The Sunken Galley