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Drink

Mulled Wine

A warm beverage made by boiling spices in water, adding port wine and sugar, then serving hot with toast.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Port wine and nutmeg work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 462 recipes. Both carry linalool, which smells floral, citrus. The science ↓

Mulled Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the mulled wine

  1. Boil the spices in water until the flavor is extracted.

  2. Add the port wine and sugar, then boil together.

Serve

  1. Serve hot with toast.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Port wine + nutmegtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together462 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  2. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  3. Port wine + sugartop 24% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together805 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

Sugar and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Port wine
Provides the main body, fruity sweetness and alcohol-driven aroma of the drink.
Sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the wine's acidity and tannins.
Nutmeg
Contributes warm, aromatic spice flavor when its compounds are extracted into the hot liquid.

The step that matters

Boiling the spices in water. The spice flavor must be extracted into the water before the wine is added. Boiling long enough releases the aromatic compounds, but overheating the port can drive off alcohol and aroma, so the wine is added afterward.

Swap the nutmeg

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (port wine, sugar):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Clovefits about as well
  3. Nutmegthe original
  4. Gingerfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, sugar. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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