Skip to main content
Drink

Mulled Wine

Mulled wine is a warm beverage made by simmering wine with water, spices, sugar, and optional orange.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Cinnamon and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 14,189 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Mulled Wine

Ingredients

Directions

Make the syrup

  1. Boil the spices in the water with the sugar until it forms a thick syrup, being careful not to burn it.

Finish and serve

  1. Pour the wine into the saucepan and stir gently until it is just about to boil.

  2. Serve hot, adding a thin shaving of orange for extra flavor if desired.

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. Cinnamon + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together14,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Cinnamon + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,380 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  3. Clove + gingertop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,038 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Cinnamon + orangetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,437 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Ginger + orangetop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,833 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Port wine
Forms the liquid base and carries the sweetness and body of the drink.
Powdered loaf sugar
Dissolves into the water to form a thick syrup that sweetens the drink.
Mixed spices
Release their aroma and flavor into the hot liquid, giving the drink its warm character.

The step that matters

Avoid burning the syrup. Sugar syrup that scorches turns bitter and dark, and that bitterness carries through into the finished wine. Keeping the heat controlled lets the sugar thicken into a clean, sweet syrup.

Swap the orange

The recipe marks orange as optional. How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (port wine, cinnamon, clove, ginger, sugar):

  1. Figfits about as well
  2. Pearfits about as well
  3. Orangethe original
  4. Vanillafits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against port wine, cinnamon, clove, ginger, 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.

You might also like

Ginger WineGinger Wine12 recipesWine WheyWine Whey111 recipesRaisin WineRaisin Wine64 recipesEgg WineEgg Wine58 recipes