White Mulled Wine

Although I’m not much of a wine connoisseur, I do think of myself as a bit of a mulled wine connoisseur, it’s not Christmas if I don’t go down to Manchester Christmas markets and purchase a ridiculously overpriced cup of mulled wine from one of their stalls. The best mulled wine you can buy in my opinion is the bottles of Gluhwein from Aldi. M&S used to do a lovely white mulled wine but they don’t sell it anymore so I’ve had to make my own. There’s a couple of recipes on BBC Good Food, I made the one with cider last year but this year’s was purely wine. There was no sugar in the recipe so it was really more like a French vin chaud than a mulled wine so I added 5 tbsp sugar which seemed to be just the right amount.

Serves 6

Ingredients

• 2 bottles of cheap white wine. You could get a sweet riesling and cut down on the sugar possibly.
• 100ml madeira (I used sherry as I don’t have any madeira)
• 1 lemon
• 4 dried apricots
• 5 cardamom pods
• 1 star anise
• 1 vanilla pod
• 1 tbsp honey
• 5 tbsp sugar

Method

1.) Chop the lemon in half and slice up one half. Discard the pips.

2.) Slice a vanilla pod in half

3.) Bash up 5 cardamom pods – I used a pestle

4.) Add the wine, madeira, 1/2 lemon, cardamom pods, anise, vanilla and honey to a large pan.

5.) Bring to a simmer and heat on a low heat for 30 minutes.

6.) Strain out the vanilla, apricots, lemon, cardamom and star anise. Add the sugar and stir to melt.

7.) Enjoy while still hot or heat up in a mug in the microwave later.