Sangria

In honour of the hot weather we encountered during (some of) this month, Sangria is the cocktail of the month. Sangria is one of the best-known punches and has its origins way back in time in Spain when wine and whatever fruit was available was mixed with a little sweetener. Today its reputation has been damaged by the sweetened watered-down wine served up as Sangria in some tourist resorts.

There are five basic ingredients for a traditional punch - alcohol, spice, sugar, water, fruit - and its name comes from the Hindi word for five, panch.

So, first things first, Sangria isn’t a way to use up cheap and nasty wine! The predominant taste is that of the wine and if you start off with a bad taste, you’ll end up with a bad taste! So you want to choose a medium to good wine as your base. And allow time for the wine to absorb the flavours of the fruits.
This is a fairly basic Sangria recipe which leaves plenty of scope for you to add brandy, orange liqueur, ginger ale - whatever you have to hand - to vary it.

• 1 bottle dry red wine 
• 1 tablespoon sugar 
• 2 large oranges 
• 2 large lemons 
• 2 medium peaches 
• 1 cup soda

Slice 1 orange and 1 lemon. Squeeze the juice from the other orange and lemon. Peel and stone the peaches, and cut into chunks. Put the fruit slices and juice into a punchbowl with the wine and sugar and mix well. Leave in the fridge overnight. When you’re ready to serve, mix in the soda.