Wine for a Cold Winter's Night

I love this time of year. The Christmas lights everywhere, the candles burning in people's windows, the overall festiveness. I'm a total sucker for it.

I did not grow up with a Christmas tree, but once I started dating my now-husband, we started getting one together, and it is now one of my favorite holiday traditions. I love the green of it, the sharp, clean smell, the way the colored lights shine and refract through the glass ornaments. Sitting in the dark, with only the holiday lights and Menorah candles to see by is total contentedness to me. If I could add a roaring fire and snow falling outside I would be in heaven, but, hey, I take what I can get. And other than a hot spiced (and rum-spiked) apple cider, my favorite winter-night holiday drink is a hot spiced mead.

I first heard of mead many years ago when I was acting in a production of Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale with a wonderful theatre company called A Noise Within in Glendale, CA. (I have acted in a lot of Shakespeare plays, and in case you were wondering, this performance of A Winter's Tale is not to be confused with the production of The Merchant of Venice I did in NYC, in which I accidentally went on stage for a scene one night without any pants on; but that's a story for another day.)

A Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's later plays, and as a result it is long, full of very difficult and convoluted language, and a plot both simple and confusing to the degree that even the actors who are performing it often have no idea what is going on. In spite of that, I think it is a wonderful play, full of great female characters, love, betrayal, shepherds, country wenches, half-naked men doing satyr dances, and a man who gets chased off stage by a bear. In the course of this production, those of us playing the shepherdess wenches had to do research on country weddings and festivals in days of yore, and discovered that mead was a very popular beverage at such events. I then set about finding a liquor store that actually sold mead and brought some to rehearsal so everyone could try it. The verdict was yum.

For some reason, mead seems to have gone the way of things like grog, leeches, and gnawing on whole legs of mutton, but there are still companies that make mead and an occasional restaurant or bar that sells it, and I heartily recommend you try it. It can be served hot or cold, but I prefer the warmed version. Chaucer's Mead comes with a little mulling spice baggie attached to the neck of the bottle, so all you have to do is pour the wine into a saucepan with the mulling spice bag and simmer. Even if you find a mead without a spice bag, you can just make your own by tossing in some cinnamon sticks, orange rind, cloves, etc. Now a wise person, an organized person, will wrap said spices in a bit of cheesecloth, or one of those do-it-yourself tea bags, but I am not one of those people, and I just toss the spices loose into the pot with the wine. The taste is the same, it just means that you have to spend 10 minutes bobbing for spices before you serve the mead. The cinnamon sticks and orange peel are easy to get out, it's the cloves that are sneaky buggers. Worse come to worse, just serve your guests a glass with a clove or two in it. It's not the end of the world, and just tell them it's the way they served mead in the olden days.

Mead is made from honey, in the case of Chaucer's Mead, three different kinds of honey. When I tasted the mead before heating it with the mulling spices, it was surprisingly light and not too sweet, with a fresh smell and taste of orange blossom and honeysuckle. After mulling it with the spices for about 10 minutes, the orange blossom and honey-sweetness were very slightly intensified, and blended with the cinnamon and cloves from the spice bags. I let it steep with the spices for another 30 minutes or so, after which the color darkened, and the sweetness increased yet again. At this point, it took on a much stronger taste of apples, cinnamon, orange and clove. I enjoyed it at every stage, but I think for drinking with a dessert, heating it for 10-15 minutes with the spices gets the mead to just the right place. We drank it with some vanilla and chocolate French Macaroons from Trader Joe's, but I also thought it would be delicious with something like a fruit Pavlova, one of those light desserts made from meringue, whipped cream, strawberries and/or raspberries. Mead would also make a nice poaching liquid for pears, peaches or nectarines.

Now I know that egg nog is the traditional holiday beverage, but it just isn't always what I'm looking for on a cold winter's night. I didn't grow up drinking it (no Christmas tree, no Nog), and I always thought the name was a euphemism of sorts, like an Egg Cream, which as far as I know has neither egg nor cream in it. So I asssumed Egg Nog had neither egg nor nog in it, but oh was I wrong.

My introduction to egg nog came when I was in my twenties, working at a very prestigious Manhattan university as an assistant to a microbiologist who ran a research lab. This lab was full of some very smart, funny, wacky, terrific people, and they really liked their parties. They especially liked their Christmas party and their Nog. The making of the lab's egg nog began about six weeks before the party, when one of the post-docs there (who became one of my best friends) and I would go shopping for the ingredients. When we got back to the lab everyone would gather around the desk in my boss's office and watch while he concocted this brew. I watched that first winter in horror and amazement as he poured sugar, heavy cream, light cream, six gallons of dark and light rum, cinnamon, nutmeg and about a hundred eggs into a steel container and mixed it all together.

The alcohol fumes emanating from the vat got the entire lab tipsy, and made me think that there was no way anyone in their right mind could consume this potion and live. I was assured that by the time we drank it, I would hardly taste the alcohol in it. Because of the size of the container, the only refrigerator we could store it in was the lab fridge; the one that was NEVER supposed to contain any food or drink; the one that housed all manner of things bacteria, microbe and Ebola. The potential cross-contamination however seemed part of the holiday festivities, that you didn't know, with your first sip, if that strange sensation you had was the alcohol flooding your system or your organs starting to liquify.

So in the nog went and there it sat for about six weeks. Every week or so, we would take it out of the fridge, gather around the desk again, and stir the brew.

On the night of the Christmas party I finally got to taste it, my first egg nog, and actually, it was spectacular. And they were right, you couldn't taste the alcohol at all, but those six weeks of mellowing in the fridge seemed to have exponentially increased the alcohol's potency, so that one tablespoon was enough to make me kick off my shoes and dance like Britney Spears, even when there was no music playing. It was a high point for others in the lab, who took pictures and pointed, but a bit of a low-point for me.

So for now, when I want a winter dessert beverage, I will stick with my spiced mead. My hubby and I will put on our jammies, turn the lights off, listen to our Frank Sinatra while cuddling on the couch, sipping our hot drink and looking at the candles and christmas tree lights. In my mind, that's not a bad way to spend an evening. The only things that could possibly make it better would be a snow storm and a roaring fire. And perhaps a roast mutton leg to gnaw on. Maybe next year.