Our Sangria
It has undoubtedly become summer here in A2: It is hot, and it is humid…yikes. But I have begun feeling my urge to have sangria, and at our local food bloggers meeting we were talking about it, too. So I dug a bit and found my post from May 2012 in which I posted my recipe. Until then, I had never made sangria. But I thought whatever, it cannot be too hard… So back then, I scoured the web, and found tons of recipes, like this one or that one, usually boasting that they are the best recipe ever. A surprising number were for white sangria of which I had never even heard of before. I was also disturbed by the frequent ingredient of club soda or ginger ale…just did not sound right to me.
Eventually, I just decided to give it my own try, pure and simple:
– 5 liters of Franzia boxed shiraz (hey, it is the world’s most popular wine after all…according to their website) – I picked a shiraz because it tends to be more spicy than the other varieties they have and I thought spice notes like cinnamon and cardamom etc. would go well with the fruit that was going in. Also, don’t even bother with buying more expensive wines, the idea is using a cheap wine and flavor it to taste.
– 2 oranges, 1 lemon, 1 apple (all organic, because they will soak with their skins in the wine) cut in wheels. Peaches are also great.
– 2 oranges squeezed into the wine
– 2 cups of sugar dissolved in 1 1/2 cup of warm water (to create a syrup that blends easier with the wine than the granulated sugar) – make this according to your own taste.
A friend of ours also adds some vanilla aroma, which I have found to be a great addition, too.
Mix it all, chill it for as long as you can (ours chilled for about 10 hours, overnight is even better) and that is that. No club soda, no ginger ale. We added some sparkling water to make it bubbly later, but I don’t think it is necessary. I thought it worked pretty nicely…
This is not a 5 liter cooler…I refilled it from the bucket.
the winegetter 