Mulled Wine

On cold evenings that don't feel like hot chocolate nights, Mulled Wine presents a tasty, fun alternative. Made with wine that’s spiked with brandy, the beauty of this beverage is the subtle flavours the many spices give it. While heating the alcohol mixture, add oranges, cinnamon, star anise, and cloves, among many, many other options. A sweetener like sugar or honey is optional but certainly adds to the cosy feeling that sipping on Mulled Wine creates.

While this is how the drink is largely created today, at different points in its long history, variations in the recipe existed.

It originated in the second century by the Ancient Greeks who put spices in wine and heated it up to prevent wastage and worked as a defence against their harsh winters. According to one legend, they called it ‘hippocras’, named after Hippocrates.

The Romans also did the same, calling it instead Conditum Paradoxum. A Roman cookbook dated around the 5th or 6th century by Apicius details the recipe, which includes equal parts wine and honey that were boiled and reduced, to which was added pepper, bay leaves, saffrons, and dates.

Its popularity grew during the Middle Ages when water was largely unsanitary and undrinkable. Across Europe, people created variations with local spices.

In Britain, a 1596 recipe for Hypocrace in Thomas Dawson’s The Good Housewife’s Jewel states:

“Take a gallon of white wine, sugar two pounds, of cinnamon, ginger, long pepper, mace not bruised galingall [sic]…and cloves not bruised. You must bruise every kind of spice a little and put them in an earthen pot all day. And then cast them through your bags two times or more as you see cause. And so drink it.”

In his 1843 novel A Christmas Carol, author Charles Dickens wrote about Smoking Bishop, a version of the Mulled Wine. The association between the beverage and Christmas grew, and there was no looking back. Today, across Europe, it’s also called glühwein, vin chaud, and glögg among other names.