Mulled Wine With Brandy, Honey, and Spices

An easy-to-make, big-batch cocktail that's perfect for New Year's Eve.

During the pandemic, lots of small group gatherings migrated outside, even — especially — during the chilly depths of winter. When I hosted friends, it was on the back patio, sometimes in near-freezing temperatures. 

Now, on the one hand, this did not bother me, personally, because I am a cold-weather maniac.¹ Put me outside on a 35-degree evening in a sweater and a pair of thick wool socks, hand me a glass of whiskey, and I’m happy. But most people are not maniacs who enjoy freezing temperatures. 

So I needed to find ways to keep people warm. That meant heated blankets, a fire pit — and warm drinks. Big batches of warm drinks. 

The ideal big-batch warm drink needed to be…

• Easy and quick to make 

• Inexpensive and accessible, requiring no hard-to-find ingredients 

• Scalable to accommodate smaller and larger groups 

• Approachable for all types of tastes and palates

It also needed to be tasty and balanced, but not too high-proof since it’s a party drink and some people like to have multiple servings. 

In other words, it needed to be something like a batched, heated, low-ABV cocktail. 

So after some experimentation, I settled on a simple mulled wine, with honey, brandy, citrus, and spices. 

It checks off all the required boxes: It’s easy, fast, inexpensive, and accessible. It’s also quite tasty, with a loose cocktail-like structure and sensibility even though it’s relatively low-proof. 

You and your friends can sit outside and happily sip this concoction on a cold night. Or if you are not a cold weather maniac, you can just make it and consume it indoors, like a normal person who enjoys normal temperatures — and delicious drinks. 

In any case, this is a great batched drink for any cold-weather group occasion. Indeed, it is what I’m making for some friends this coming weekend, on New Year’s Eve. (Speaking of which: Happy almost New Year’s!)

So I thought I’d share it with all of you, and in the process show how even this sort of loose, wine-based drink fits into the same sort of conceptual framework as a lot of other cocktails, like the Old Fashioned and the Manhattan. 

Cocktails 101

Basic mulled wine is very easy to make. You just mix some spices into wine and heat the mix. The Romans were doing this nearly 2000 years ago. The internet has many instructions for doing this. You barely need a recipe. 

But if you want something a little bit more cocktail-like, well, then you need to build a mulled wine that’s just a little more, er, cocktail-like in construction. 

What’s a cocktail? If you think of the Old Fashioned as the essential cocktail template — its earliest incarnations were, in fact, just called “cocktails” without any further delineation— then it’s just spirit, sugar, bitters, water. 

Or, to make it even more basic: spirit, sweetener, spices, water. 

You can produce all sorts of permutations from that template. A Manhattan can be understood as an Old Fashioned with sweet vermouth in the sweetener slot, for example. A Negroni is spirit (gin), sweetener (sweet vermouth), and bittersweet spices (Campari). And so on and so forth. Even as cocktails have become much more elaborate, many of them still draw from that original framework. 

And that template can guide a mulled wine as well. 

Wine and Dine

Now, we could just make a scaled-up Manhattan, add some water, and heat it on the stove. But that’s going to have a lot more alcoholic punch than we want. And besides, this is mulled wine, so we should probably start with, you know…wine? 

I’m a cocktail guy, not a wine guy. Like a lot of other nerds my age, I saw Sideways² when it came out in theaters in the early 00s, and spent a little bit of time romanticizing Paul Giamatti’s acerbic Wine Guy persona.³ But in the end, it just didn’t work out for me.

I’ve read Kevin Zraly’s Windows on the World wine book. I’ve tried reading Karen MacNeil’s Wine Bible. Eventually, however, I came to accept that I was stuck with Cocktail Brain, not Wine Brain. Unless it relates to a fortified wine like vermouth or sherry, wine-related information just will not stay in my head. 

But when making mulled wine, you need some wine. So instead of obsessing over the exact right bottle, I realized I needed to do the closest thing possible to simply not making a decision. Hence, the famous — infamous? — two buck chuck: Charles Shaw Cabernet Sauvignon from Trader Joe’s. 

These days, two buck chuck is more like $4.50 a bottle, but the point is that it easily meets the affordability requirement. Also, you can get it pretty much everywhere.

And if we are going for something cocktail-like in character, well, cocktails have often been systems for dressing up cheap booze. In the Death & Co. book Cocktail Codex, bartender Dave Fernie writes that “the original Old Fashioned was a way to make shitty booze taste better, and we should honor that.” For this drink, we’ll extend that idea to cheap mulled wine.

Vermouth and Consequences

Now that the wine choice is settled, let’s go back to the one part of the wine world I know a little bit about: fortified wines like vermouth. Vermouth takes many forms, but at heart it’s just wine that has been “fortified” with the addition of sweetener, spices, and some sort of spirit. 

We are back in cocktail territory. So we can just do the same thing with our bottle of cheap red wine — fortify it with a sweetener, spices, and some sort of spirit. 

For this recipe, I use three flavoring elements: cinnamon, allspice, and fresh cut orange wheels.

Wait, you are yelling, oranges aren’t a spice! Sure, yeah, I am not saying they are. But citrus peels are

• used in cocktails

• also common elements in the production of amaro, which I think of as a bittersweet cousin to vermouth. 

For the spirit, I used my go-to inexpensive brandy, E&J XO or VSOP. This is the same brandy I use in my low-proof eggnog. It’s the same brandy I use in my Thanksgiving Sour. It’s the same I use in any number of Old Fashioned riffs.

It’s not exquisite, but it’s quite competent. Like an employee who shows up every day on time and diligently follows instructions, it just works. This is why I use it so often. 

And for the sweetener, I use honey, because it’s easygoing and plays well with all of the other elements. Also, there’s always a bottle of honey around, so I never have to go scrounging.

There’s one final element. Remember how a classic cocktail is fundamentally just spirit, sugar, bitters, and water?

Well, I have learned that this drink is better with some water added to the mix. When you stir an Old Fashioned or a Manhattan, you’re not just chilling the drink, you’re diluting it, which helps with integrating the elements and smoothing off some of rough edges. Added water plays the same role here.

The result is something very much like a low-key, warming cocktail. It has spirit, spice, and sweetener, plus a little bit of water. 

In a weird way, we have made something that resembles a big batch of low-ABV brandy Manhattan. The ratio is obviously quite different, with wine and spices playing a far larger part in the production. But the underlying idea is fairly similar.

In this newsletter, I try to stress the relationships between seemingly cocktails — the ways that most drinks follow a handful of core templates and systems. Once you understand those systems, you can make and modify almost anything. That’s true even when making a big batch of mulled wine. 

Preparation Notes

• This recipe is written for a conventional stovetop. But I’ve often made it outside using a portable induction burner, which allows me to place the mix in a more central location. The temperature controls will be slightly different, but basically you want to briefly bring the mix up to a low boil at first, then reduce it to simmer to keep warm for the rest of the night. 

• The best way to enjoy this is in mugs that have been pre-warmed with hot water. This is optional (see instruction #2) but it keeps things toasty, which is especially important if you are drinking this outside on a cold evening. 

• This specific recipe serves 2-4 people. However, it scales easily based on the number of bottles of wine you want to use. So if you add one bottle of wine, just double all the other ingredients. If you want a make a batch built on three bottles of wine, then triple the ingredients, and so on.

Mulled Wine With Honey and Brandy

• 4 ounces brandy

• 4 ounces water

• 4 fluid ounces honey (½ cup, or about half a Trader Joe’s Honey Bear)

• 1 bottle red wine, such as Charles Shaw Cabernet Sauvignon 

• 5-6 allspice berries (one for each orange wheel)

• 1 orange sliced into wheels (should make about 5-6 wheels)

• 4 cinnamon sticks, broken

INSTRUCTIONS 

1. Gather all ingredients. 

2. (Optional) For the best experience, you want to serve this in mugs that have been warmed up in advance. The way to do that is to fill them with hot water for a few minutes prior to serving. The time to start boiling water is now! Pour hot water into mugs once boiled. 

3. Slice the orange into wheels, then slot the allspice berries into the orange wheels. This prevents the small berries from floating in the mix.

   

    

4. Combine all ingredients in a saucepan on the stove. Heat at medium-high until just barely boiling, stirring to integrate.

5. When the mix starts to boil, turn down heat to a low simmer, just enough to keep the mix warm. Leave it on simmer throughout the evening. 

6. Serve in mugs or heat-safe glasses, ideally pre-warmed. (If pre-warming, you’ll need to dump the hot water out of the mugs first.)

7. Garnish with an orange wedge and a cinnamon stick. 

Large Dog, Holiday Edition

1. I have never willingly turned on the heat in the basement where my home bar is located. I also rarely if ever turn on the overhead lights. It’s dark. It’s cold. There is too much whiskey. It’s great. My wife sometimes describes my environmental preferences as “mushroom-like.”

2. It is somewhat unsettling to me that this is now a “classic” movie trailer. It’s from 2004! It’s not even old enough to drink (legally).

3. Acerbic Wine Guy is a type of guy, much like Fernet Guy.