This sounds lovely ... and I love cloves. For whatever reason, I didn't experience much mulled wine in my younger years. Maybe it was a cultural thing? We tend more towards experiments with harder spirits. Someone always had a "cordial" or two after dinner in their basement bar ... back when basement bars were a thing, generally near a under-used ping pong table. I can't remember the last time someone metioned "Cherry Herring."
BTW ... "I did have a bottle of inexpensive (but not plonk) sweet red." How does one draw a line between inexpensive and plonk?
I buy inexpensive wine for cooking. My rule of thumb is that if I couldn't drink a glass of it, it's not worth cooking with. That's the really cheap stuff - generally either harshly alcoholic and nasty, or so sweet it might as well be cough syrup (and tastes like that, too). Generally I'm paying around 7-10$ a bottle for that drinkable level of wine, although once in a while I'll find it cheaper. Neither of us are big drinkers, and even less so on wine, although there are a couple of German whites he likes and so do I (Blue Nun is one of them), so when I buy wine it's going to be used for cooking not drinking and I'm not going to pay 20+ a bottle.
Yep ... I love the experience of a really good wine and have had a few with family members. SIL is in the wine business. But I look for the drinkable $9 bottle to go with dinner and have found pretty solid buys at CostCo of all places!
This sounds lovely ... and I love cloves. For whatever reason, I didn't experience much mulled wine in my younger years. Maybe it was a cultural thing? We tend more towards experiments with harder spirits. Someone always had a "cordial" or two after dinner in their basement bar ... back when basement bars were a thing, generally near a under-used ping pong table. I can't remember the last time someone metioned "Cherry Herring."
BTW ... "I did have a bottle of inexpensive (but not plonk) sweet red." How does one draw a line between inexpensive and plonk?
I buy inexpensive wine for cooking. My rule of thumb is that if I couldn't drink a glass of it, it's not worth cooking with. That's the really cheap stuff - generally either harshly alcoholic and nasty, or so sweet it might as well be cough syrup (and tastes like that, too). Generally I'm paying around 7-10$ a bottle for that drinkable level of wine, although once in a while I'll find it cheaper. Neither of us are big drinkers, and even less so on wine, although there are a couple of German whites he likes and so do I (Blue Nun is one of them), so when I buy wine it's going to be used for cooking not drinking and I'm not going to pay 20+ a bottle.
Yep ... I love the experience of a really good wine and have had a few with family members. SIL is in the wine business. But I look for the drinkable $9 bottle to go with dinner and have found pretty solid buys at CostCo of all places!