SANGRIA 7.22.11

We're enduring a rough heatwave in the Northeast at the moment. Which reminds us of Houston. Which reminds us of… Sangria! Our perennial favorite for a day when everyone's off and it's just too damn hot to go outside. For more than blueberries. And, so :

Sangria 7.22.11

Gather :

1 cup lightly crushed blueberries & 2 sliced yellow peaches, macerated briefly with a little bit of sugar (a couple tablespoons will do)

Add :

1 bottle dry but not-too-dry Spanish red wine (we used Altos del Cuco, see below)
1/2 cup brandy (of mediocre quality or slightly better, it's not yet time to whip out the Henny)
1 sliced orange (we used valencias)
juice of 1 orange (ditto valencia)
1 sliced lemon (sliced real thin to avoid the odd over-tart glass)
1/2 cup sugar (or more, to taste)

Chill in the fridge for a few hours, then scoop a bit of fruit and pour a bit of sangria into stemmed red-wine glasses, or goblets, or whatever works best. Then add ice & club soda to taste.

On the Selection of Fruit :

We picked some blueberries from the bushes at our house and used some nicely room-ripened Jersey peaches but we would like to note that this DOES NOT MAKE US BETTER THAN ANYONE ELSE. They were merely at hand. Whatever should do nicely. If you have a plethora of gooseberries, too, or whatever, this will likely work. I think the peaches are the key element - soft enough that you have to slice them slowly and evenly for fear of mashing them.

The oranges should be plump but not too juice heavy. Of moderate ripeness.

On the Selection of Wine :

In The Foods and Wines of Spain, one of the classic English-language Spanish cookbooks, Penelope Casas recommends when making a red sangria to use "a dry, full-bodied red wine, preferably of Spanish import from Valencia or Valdepeñas," and I see no reason to contradict this. I would add only that a wine following that description from southern Italy or South America or Australia would work almost as well (if not as authentically), and that the key phrase here is "dry," not "full-bodied." The latter is mainly a reminder that you don't want some acid-heavy, puckeringly dry big red for your sangria. What you should avoid, though (and I've been as guilty of this as anyone), is picking a sweet red for your sangria. This seems to be the pattern most often repeated by home sangria-makers here and it's a key one to avoid. After all, you're adding nothing that isn't sweet (fruit, sugar, eau de vie, brandy) to the wine to make it sangria. Why choose a sweet wine? It'll only make the whole experience a cloying one.

At any rate, we picked Altos Del Cuco, a monastrell/syrah/tempranillo mix that drifts towards the dry side of what is usually a more even-tempered combo. At around $10 and under a bottle, it's about the perfect price point for a batch of sangria. If you spend $15 US or more on a bottle for sangria (outside of extremely bourgie districts), you're spending to much. Altos Del Cuco is a clean, dry (but not acerbically so) red with enough notes of fruit to make for an excellent batch. There's a fairly decent review here.