Get into the holiday spirit with Honey Mulled Wine! This red wine is sweetened with honey and spiced with cinnamon. It's an easy (and easy to love) winter warmer.

Photography Credit: Elise Bauer

Now this was a happy accident. I don’t know how I ended up with some red wine in a cup with honey in it, but it happened, and I’m so glad it did!

Once I discovered how lovely my red wine tasted with honey, I thought to make a mulled wine with it.

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Add the honey, tame the spices

Mulled wines are typically very spicy affairs, with cloves, allspice, nutmeg, cinnamon, orange slices, etc. All well and good.

The problem is that all of those spices together can detract from the honey, and it’s the honey taste that goes so well with the wine.

So in this simple mulled wine, we are dialing back the spices a bit. I’m using a cinnamon stick, a few peppercorns, and maybe a single star anise. The idea is to enhance the flavors of the wine and the honey, not compete with them.

Mulled wine ingredients

Start with a robust red wine, like a zinfandel or a pinot noir. Use a wine that you would enjoy drinking on its own. It doesn’t have to be expensive (it shouldn’t be), but it should have good flavor.

Add about 3/4 of a cup of honey, and 3/4 of a cup of water, for every 750 ml bottle of wine. This results in a nicely sweet mulled wine, so if you would like it less sweet, cut the honey back to half a cup.

For spices, add a 3-inch cinnamon stick as well as several whole black peppercorns. From this point you can improvise a bit. I like the taste of star anise, so I may add that to the mix.

Great spices for mulled wine are:

Cinnamon

Black peppercorns

Whole allspice berries

Cloves

Whole cardamom pods

Star Anise

Strips of orange zest

People also like to add fruit like orange slices, cranberries, or apple slices. Feel free to add any spices or fruit that you want. Just taste as you go and know that the more you add, the more the mulled wine becomes about the spices and not the simple delicious flavors of honey and wine.

Mulled wine by the glass

If you are unsure about whether or not you’ll like this recipe, just try it with a half glass of wine first, not the whole bottle. Heat the wine with a little honey to see if you like the way those flavors work together.

Try these other warm winter drinks