You'd fit right in here in Wisconsin. I shall have to try this recipe.

But I am so there with you on the sour-apple and coconut rum, they bear not thinking on.

Use fruit punch
Add frozen fruit from a bag
Cheap wine
club soda or ginger ale
additional hard alcohol of choice (rum/brandy)

For dark sangria, use red wine, Dole berry punch, the mixed berry frozen fruit, club soda and brandy

For peach sangria, use white wine, Dole peach punch, the frozen peach fruit mix, ginger ale and peach rum.

One thing my wife likes, and has introduced to at least one restaurant that had never heard of the concept, is white wine sangria. You obviously wouldn't use an oakey wine like chardonnay for it (as opposed to my mom's friend's recipe, which would do ok with Okie wines...) but any basic dry or sweet white wine seems to work ok.

For instance, while few recipes contain it, I consider chocolate a critical ingredient of a chili con carne. Relatively few recipes for Bolognese sauce contain milk, but it's an essential part of the authentic dish.

For sangria, I'd suggest substituting some Triple Sec (or, if unavailable, Cointreau) for about half of the brandy. It's an unusual choice, but it works pretty well, I think.

But white wine sangria? That really is heresy. Sorry.

Either it was in the original and has been dispensed with, or something else is wrong.

You could always mix some red food coloring in the sangria to rationalize not feeling guilty about enjoying it. But then again, I was conditioned at an early age to prefer Bernkasteler Doktor over any other wine, so perhaps my objectivity in this case may be considered questionable.

I speak from experience both hilarious and painful. Turns out hangover is like debt: you can avoid it in the short term at a much higher cost in the long term.

I don't know--sounds pretty good to me.

Oh wait.

That makes a lot of sense. I've always found Glühwein works the same way - use a good wine, get a crappy product, use $2 wine, it's delicious.

And I just happen to be making Sangria Blanco for a gathering this weekend. Don't try to stop me! I've got white wine and citrus fruits, and I'm not afraid to use them!

I also substitute tequila on occasion. It provides a sharpness that really brings out the zing of the citrus.

I also make Clerico, a.k.a. white sangria using less citrus (about 1/2 of above) and adding fresh summer fruit. We first had this in Punta del Este, Uruguay on a warm summer day and a pitcher was a lovely companion to our delicious fish lunch. Who knows if it's authentic, but it's tasty and disappears FAST at summer gatherings.

(I *do* draw the line well before the bar that was selling "mojitos" that consisted of creme de menthe and Dr. Pepper, though.)

On white wine-based sangria analogues (safe enough?): one good use for cheap non-oaky white wine is to mix with equal amounts of guarana (Brazilian soda based on fruit of the same name) and add brandy-soaked fruit. Extra sugar isn't necessary in this case; and it makes a good punch without the brandy too, for that matter.

My strongest sangria memory is on the prep side, not the drinking side. We threw a party at which we served (among other things) a rich lentil soup and sangria, and proceeded to go through a large amount of indifferently-stored red wine: each bottle we opened was immediately sampled and classified into one of "drink straight", "sangria", "soup", or "drain", and disposed of appropriately.

Our final recipe included a tip which might be useful to other experimenters. It was:
2 cans red "Five-Alive" frozen concentrate
partially re-fill the cans with rum (half to two-thirds, judgement of the bartender)
1 2-liter bottle 7-Up
*dash of tamarind concentrate*
serve into small ice-filled glasses ((portion control))

The dash of tamarind completely cuts through the syrupyness of the 7-Up, and darkens the color.

Two great tastes that taste great together? It's rare enough to find a drink recipe that features Dr. Pepper, though.

(emptor is from emere, "to buy".)

Trying to find a referent for that asterisk has left me with a painful case of footnotus interruptus.

Hover your mouse over the asterisk and lo, your footnote shall appear.

Well, in medieval Latin, at any rate, it was potator, as in:

Meum est propositum in taberna mori,
Ut sint vina proxima morientis ori.
Tunc cantabunt letius angelorum chori:
Deus sit propitius huic potatori.

Up to you how proper you consider medieval Latin to be.

[*Looks wrong however I spell it. {'title' trick don't work in comments}]

Locally, the drink is very close to what Teresa has put forward:

• red wine (house wine although I don't think anyone here would be happy with it described as bad quality!)


• fruit (oranges and apples, primarily)


• spirit or spirits (this is the secret ingredient bit, suddenly you'll find the locals a bit more guarded about what they tell you)


• lemonade as in the cheap fizzy drink - Sprite or 7-Up would be a good substitute in the US (I can imagine that once out of the local area, there would be arguments as to which lemonade but here, it's always La Casera.

Definitely no spices! And although the locals will tell you they use "whatever fruit comes to hand," I got looked at askance for adding strawberries and pineapple to a batch.

Personally, I add sugar and sparkling water instead of lemonade but other than that I don't mess much with the basics.

If you've no objection to letting Teresa have the recipe again, would you mind sharing it with us?

I'm curious to see how well her skill at redaction served to duplicate your masterpiece.

Me, I like a bit of brown sugar, but I also like a lot more lemon than most.

I might make it with soda water, on occaision, but the level of sweet is always very low.

In the UK, and probably other places in Europe, lemonade is a fizzy drink laden with sugar, so 7-Up is a decent enough substitute if you don't have that and that's what you want. I'm not sure I've ever seen the fizzy drink variety in the US, but I haven't really looked, either.

But the lemonade one is the hardest to wrap my head around, because, for me, they are variations on a theme, and lemonade isn't.

Would it help to think of it as "fizzy lemonaide" ?

There's way too much sugar in that stuff for me to really be able to think of it as lemonade. The carbonation is purely secondary.

My boss maintains that soda should mean soda water, not fizzy drink, but I think he's given up on that bit of language change. The generic use of "coke" is the one that always gets me.

I don't think it is any less sugar laden but it tastes nice.

I have no objection, but, like I told Teresa, I can't tell you the recipe because there isn't one. It's all "enough" and "until it tastes right."

Take a bunch of citrus, mostly limes and lemons and at least one orange, whatever's at the store. Cut 'em all in half, squish 'em a bit, and sprinkle on some sugar to pull out the juice. Put the fruit and juice in the big glass thing we use to make sangria, or a couple of old wide-mouth Paul Masson bottles (Paul Masson: We will sell no wine before its time. "Hey, Paul! There's a guy here with two bucks!" "It's time!") if you can't find the pitcher or haven't washed it from last time. Pour in an entire bottle of the cheapest red wine you can get. Add brandy until it tastes right (usually less than a quarter of the bottle). If you still have room in the pitcher, add more fruit. Mix by boxing. (That is, pouring from container to container. Stirring doesn't work that well.) Chill for a while, or until the hot dogs are done, whichever comes first. Serve over ice, leaving the fruit in the pitcher. Add more wine and brandy to the fruit if more people show up and you need more. If you run out of wine, send the junior ensign present to the grog shop to buy another bottle or two. Remember, the cheaper the wine the more you get. Add more fruit to get the right flavor.

Note: You can't make it if you've never had it. (Much like the Island of the Dead, a place you can't find if you've never been there.)

[Posted from 65.182.88.215 -- JDM]

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