Gluehwein (Hot Spiced Wine)

This time of year, whatever tiny bit of German blood my husband may have in him urges him to reach for a steaming hot glass of Gluehwien and enjoy this festive season. This is the first year that we have attempted making it from scratch at home, and I am here to share with you the results as well as the recipe (because we enjoyed it immensly).

We found a recipe on (where else?) All Recipes. This recipe, submitted by Else, was a great starting point. We made a double batch, and used some of the comments to modify the ingredients. Here's what we did...

Ingredients:

• 3/4 cup water
• 3/4 cup orange juice
• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 3/4 cup brown sugar
• 3 cinnamon sticks
• 2 lemons (1 cut in half, and 1 sliced)
• 1 orange (cut in half, one half sliced)
• 20 whole cloves
• 1.5 liter bottle of red wine (cheap merlot)

In a saucepan we combined the water, OJ, sugar and cinnamon sticks. We brought it to a boil, reduced the heat, and let it simmer. We squeezed the 2 lemon halves and 1 orange half, adding their juice to the simmering mixture and then putting the peels in as well.

We borrowed a tip from the Plain ‘Ol Gluhwein Recipe at Gluhwein.Net Blog. It suggested placing the cloves in a tea ball, so they would be easy to remove later.

Here it is, simmering away, just before we added the orange. We allowed it to simmer for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, we cut up the other lemon and the unused half of the orange for use later in the crockpot and as a garnish.

When the 30 minutes was up, besides smelling delicious, the mixture on the stovetop had also become pretty syrupy. At this point, we poured it into a mason jar for transport, because we were taking this over to our friends' house. We also took this bottle of wine that we bought very cheaply at Winco:

When we got to our friends', we plugged in our crockpot, emptied the mason jar and wine bottle into the crockpot, floated some fruit slices in there for further flavor and to look pretty, and turned it all on high. When it was steaming, we served it in a glass mug over a cinnamon stick.

It was completely delicious. Sorry that the picture up top is fuzzy. I took it very quickly at their house - explaining to my hosts that I was "blogging."



Enjoy!