I had my first glass of sangria when I traveled to Spain as a high school student. (At the time, probably still, Spain had no drinking age and as long as our parents signed permission, we were allowed one drink at meal time.)  It was a red sangria and fruity and yummy.  Fast forward 25 years:  I am flipping through an all purpose cookbook and see a recipe for sangria.  The recipe was super easy, just fruit, simple syrup, wine and club soda.  And the love affair begins.  Enter experimentation; enter Summer Sangria.

Summer Entertaining

Summer is a season of entertaining and Summer Sangria is a super easy recipe to wow your guests.  A light, fruity white sangria just seems so summery, too.  Choose a cheap wine since you will be adding simple syrup and fruit, it is unnecessary to invest in a “good wine.”  Then, it becomes all about the presentation–a wine glass with fruit floating in in it and all your guests will be pulling out their phones to take pictures.

I often drink wine while we are at our Adirondack cabin.  Usually, when we have wine at the cabin, we reach for our redneck wine glasses, but we pulled out the real wine glasses to enjoy the batch of Summer Sangria that I made for the recent holiday weekend.

Simple Syrup

The word syrup makes it sound complicated, but simple syrup is just sugar and water brought to a boil to melt the sugar.  When I make sangria, I add fruit right to the sugar and water to infuse the flavor into it.  Because I wanted to get the flavor of strawberry and citrus, I added the ends of a lemon and a lime and two whole strawberries.  Bring the mixture to a boil.  Let it cool.  Remove the cooked fruit after it has cooled.

Summer Sangria

Add the cooled simple syrup to slices of lemon, lime, more strawberries and blackberries.  Pour a 3 liter bottle of wine over that and chill until you are ready to server it.  I used Taylor Lake Country Table White.  (It’s a decent wine and it is only $9.99 for three liters at our local liquor store!) We live in the Finger Lakes, so I generally make it a practice to use local wines.  If you have wineries that are local to your area, you should use them.  Keep it local!

The longer you chill it, the more time your flavors will have to meld.  We drank this over the course of several days and the last day was definitely the best!  Be sure to plan ahead for this recipe!

This is a great drink to server with Venison Pepper Steak.  The sweet with the gentle spice of the steak is super.  We also served it up with Texas Caviar as an appetizer.

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