Winter Warmer: Mulled Wine

Hi, I'm Joe Campanale for eHow.com. Today, we're going to make mulled wine and mulled wine is a traditional European wine drink that's usually served around the holidays, around Christmas and Halloween and it's a hot and spiced wine. You start with a great red wine, but not too great, just something that you would drink on any night but not a wine that you're saving for a special occasion because we're going to cook it and add all sorts of spices and you're not going to really taste the wine after all of that. I really like to use a Cotes Du Rhone or Malbec which are really soft and juicy but they don't have too much oaky character to them. So I think we can get our whole bottle in here, perfect and then to give it a little bit of a kick you add some brandy. So brandy is made from wine. It's basically a wine that's been distilled into a high alcohol spirit. So we add six ounces of brandy and if you don't have brandy around you can substitute rum, spiced rum would be really nice. It will give you all sorts of warming spices to it or even some whiskey and then I like to add my special ingredient, my secret ingredient which is some orange bitters and basically orange bitters are orange peels and extracts that are really really concentrated and it gives you a nice jolt of fresh citrus flavor and a really balancing bitter character. So let's add about six drops of orange bitters and then to balance out the strength of the brandy and the bitter I like to add some honey. So you can add some honey right to it and another way that you could use honey is make it into a honey simple syrup and basically a honey simple syrup is equal parts water and honey that's cooked until all of the honey dissolves and that's just another way to use it. It dissolves really easily into any cocktail. It gives you a great honey flavor as well. We have some pure vanilla extract. You can also use a vanilla bean. I would take one vanilla bean and clear out the contents and then add the whole bean to the pot, just a pinch of clove. Now there are all sorts of variations of mulled wine and you can use any kind of spices that you really like. So play around with it and choose what you like. I love cinnamon, cinnamon for me is a really comforting spice. So let's add a couple of cinnamon sticks and finally some fresh ground nutmeg. If you have whole nutmeg that you can grate into it, that would be a really good option as well. Now if you wanted to do a nonalcoholic version you could totally substitute the wine for grape juice or even pomegranate juice. Alright let's give this a quick stir, it's not even hot and I can already smell all of the spices, the wine. So now you put your mulled wine on the stove. Make sure you don't let it boil because if you let it boil what happens is that alcohol actually evaporates at a lower temperature than water and you're going to take the life out of your party by getting rid of all that alcohol. Another variation or something else that you can do is assemble your mulled wine ahead of time and just put it in the refrigerator and completely forget about it until your guests arrive and then when they arrive you can heat it up serving by serving. Okay so we see now that our mulled wine is steaming and we're ready to serve it up. Now just remember that mulled wine is essentially just warm wine that's served with a bunch of different spices. So be sure to play around and make it fun and do whatever you'd like to it. You know, and I like to garnish with just a little bit of cinnamon stick and an orange wedge. There you go, so there's your holiday mulled wine. Thanks so much for watching. Definitely try this at home. It's something that's really fun, easy to do for the holidays and the other great thing about it is that once you make some mulled wine your entire place smells just like the holidays. I'm Joe Campanale for eHow.com. Tune in for more.