Scandi Winter Favourite - How to Make a Mulled Wine That'll Knock Your Socks Off

Gloegg Recipe – mulled wine

Winter seems to be ongoing, so I thought I'd share with you an all-time favourite I grew up with in Denmark: Homemade gloegg (as it’s called in Denmark) or mulled wine, is really worth the effort to make – and you’ll enjoy pure bliss all of Winter.

I’m giving you my absolute favourite recipe for a traditional Danish mulled wine, I promise you will love the effort! - with a bit of port, rum, and lots of goodies to mix up with the red wine.

But watch out, it’ll knock your socks off! (in a good way).

Disclaimer: so good, your friends won't want to leave.

This recipe is a mulled wine extract that you can make and keep in the fridge for up to a year. When you have visitors stopping in on a rainy Winter day, just take out your extract and heat up your (average) red wine and your mulled wine is served.

Work time: 30 mins.

Lasts: 1 year

Amount: 1.5 litres

Ingredients:

1 vanilla pod (You can also use a good quality vanilla paste).

200 gr. Sugar

200 gr. Muscovado sugar (darker sugar)

0.5 tsp nutmeg, grated

20 whole cloves

4 cinnamon quills

10 cardamom pods

10 peber corn

1 tsp all spice

5 star anise

1 licorice root (you can easily leave this out)

25 gr. Of ginger, cut into fine slices

300 ml. orange juice, freshly squeezed or good quality

1 organic lemon, finely sliced with skin on

2 organic oranges, finely sliced with skin on

100 ml. schnapps, taste neutral (you can leave this out, as it’s hard to get in NZ).

150 ml. dark rum

600 ml. Port, decent quality

(Note: 200 ml. is roughly 1 cup)

 

How you do it:

Mix sugar and vanilla paste/beans/pod and put into a pot together with the empty vanilla pod, muscovado sugar, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon quills, cardamom pods, peppercorns, all-spice, star anise, licorice root, ginger and orange juice

Mix it well and slowly heat it up till it reaches boiling point and the sugar has melted. Let it boil for 5 minutes and then remove the pot from the heat.

Pour you mulled wine extract, incl. spices and oranges and lemon slices, schnapps, rum and port into the pot or a couple of big clean glass jars with lids and leave it in a cool room for 1-3 weeks.

TIP: you can leave the mulled wine to sit much shorter than 3 weeks. The longer you leave it, the more taste it gets. That's all.

 

After 3 weeks:

Run the mulled wine extract through a sieve first and after that run it through a muslin cloth to make the mulled wine completely clear.
Discard of the filling and spices.
Keep the extract in a clean bottle.

TIP: you can run it through a fine sieve a couple of times too if you are ok with a few chunks in there. I do that often when I don’t have a muslin cloth available.

Serve the mulled wine

Heat up 200 ml. of red wine (1 cup) per serving glass in a pot until it is exactly just about to reach boiling point (NOTE: if it boils, you will boil away the alcohol). Take it off the heat. Add ¼ cup of mulled wine extract per 200 ml. red wine (so that’s ¼ cup extract per 1 cup red wine) and pour it into your serving glass.

Serve with chopped/slivered almonds and raisins you’ve soaked in rum (for a day if possible, or just an hour) and put into the glass. Serve with a tea spoon, so your guest can spoon out these goodies.

TIPS IF YOU DON’T HAVE 3 WEEKS TO MARINADE:

If you want to serve it up much quicker, just add the red wine to the extract pot with the spices and citrus slices and let it slowly heat up together.

DON’T BOIL!

This extracts the taste into the wine and makes a beautiful, mulled wine, much quicker.

If you have a day or two, leave it all together and then run it through the sieve and muslin cloth when you want to drink it.

You can also add a bit of schnapps here to spice it up.
Add sugar if you need it sweeter. 

TIPS FOR THE RECIPE:

Choice of wine for the mulled wine: I like to use a decent port and rum for the mulled wine extract – and then go for a lesser quality red wine to mix into the mulled wine, as the red wine taste will be overpowered by the spices. A decent Merlot could work – nothing fancy.

Choice of port for the mulled wine: I like to use a good port that I can also enjoy a glass of as it is. The port is the carrying element in the mulled wine so if you use a port you know you can enjoy too, then that’s perfect.

Less alcohol: You can leave out the schnapps and replace with more port, which gives a happy Christmas taste.

This mulled wine can keep for a long time and you can have a bottle for up to a year, which is still fresh and delicious. If you leave out the schnapps it will keep less than a year, but still good for a few months – maybe longer.

Bitterness and sliced citrus fruit: The white on the lemon and orange that sits between the lemon/orange skin and the fruit tastes bitter and can give a bitter aftertaste in the finished result. It’s an individual taste decision, some like the balanced mulled wine others find it too much. We all taste bitter differently so it’s up to the individual. If in doubt I can recommend to adding grated skin of lemon and orange instead and add the juices from the fruit and leave out completely the slices of orange and lemon.

Keep the extract in a dark cupboard at around 18-19 degrees or less. 

During the Christmas month and days you may want to embrace the northern hemisphere Christmas traditions, so heat up your wine and add your extract and sit back and take in the aromas and flavours of Christmas.

Thanks for reading and I really hope you will enjoy this!

xStine