Hypocras

Tudor Travel Guide held a virtual conference earlier this summer to mark the five hundredth anniversary of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The tastiest session was on preparing Hypocras (spiced wine). I usually make mulled wine with a red (and obviously served hot), so this version of cool spiced white or red wine is a fun change of pace.  It also seemed fitting to mark the weekend I otherwise would have been taking down tents at Faire.

I started by grinding up 2 cloves, a piece of cinnamon (aiming for ~1tsp ground), a little ginger (also aiming for ~1 tsp) and 2 black peppercorns.

I've never actually ground cinnamon bark before.
It was easier than breaking off the initial pieces.

This goes into ~2.5 cups white wine with ~1/4 cup granulated sugar.

Very appetizing appearance.

After a day or four soaking up the flavor, the solids are filtered out, and the hypocras is ready to serve. One benefit to grinding the spices myself is that the coarse pieces sank to the bottom, and I was easily able to decant the wine. When I first tried this recipe, using pre-ground spices, I had to wait much longer for the wine to filter through all the fine sediment.

When done, the hypocras looks just like normal wine.

The taste is of a sweet white wine with spices; the cinnamon is the dominant note (I think I added a touch too much), but the other flavors layer on some complexity. The closest comparison I could make is to sangria, because that's the only other cold flavored-but-not-fortified wine I'm familiar with. The presenter mentioned Rhenish (white wine from the Rhineland) and claret (red wine from Bordeaux) as the usual varieties for hypocras in 16th century England. I ended up using a sweet local white wine, and while it was fine, I think a drier variety would work better (otherwise I need to reduce the amount of sugar when using a sweet wine). When I made this before, I just used a random white I had on hand, and it was also quite palatable.