Esteliel

If you, like me, love mulled wine, especially the home made variety, but still keep a bottle of store-bought not-so-nice stuff around for those times when you come in half-frozen from the cold and don't feel like going to all that effort when you want just one cup of mulled wine, and you want it quickly...

Then I have the perfect solution for you. Mulled wine syrup! I just made a big bottle of it, and I really have to force myself to stay away from it or else I won't get any writing done this evening.

It is pretty simple: you need one bottle of a fruit juice which will go well with wine. I wanted to buy black currant juice, but they only had stuff that was made from concentrate, and I really wanted 100% fruit juice, so I took a bottle of red grape juice instead. Also, I took juice that came in a glass bottle, so I had somewhere to store the syrup in later.

All you then need is the spices you usually put into mulled wine. I took 6 star anise, 6 cloves, 4 cinnamon sticks, 1 vanilla bean and some ground cardamom, and also 2 organic oranges (you use the peel, so you want them to be free from pesticides and wax).

Thinly peel the oranges (you want as little as possible of the white stuff on it, as that will make the syrup bitter) and put the orange zest together with all the spices and the juice into a pot. Squeeze the juice from the peeled oranges into the pot as well. Heat it and let it simmer for at least half an hour, then pour it through a sieve to get rid of all the spices and pour the juice back into the pot. Add sugar (you will want at last half as much sugar as you have juice left) and bring it to a boil again, stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Wash the juice bottle with hot water, and then pour the syrup in.

You now have a really delicious mulled wine syrup, and if you next feel like some mulled wine, all you need to do is pour yourself a cup of wine, put it into the microwave and then add a bit of the syrup.