Recipe

Cooked Ingredients

Crush the cardamom pods and juniper berries and break up the star anise by hand. Add the dry ingredients and the wine in a lidded pot and bring to a boil. Once boiling, turn down the heat and let simmer for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Keep lid on to minimize evaporation. Remove from heat and let cool.

Raw Ingredients

Sugar

Caramalize 8 oz of raw sugar by whatever method works best for you, and make a syrup with 4 oz of water.

Putting it all together

Filter solids out of the cooked wine and add it to the raw ingredients. Add the sugar syrup. Bottle and chill.

Notes

• I use Bota Box Pino Grigio as my base wine. It's cheap and unobtrusive.
• I use St. Remy VSOP brandy for the exact same reason.
• I am currently using Lustau sherry
• The cloves are a recent addition. I started with 20, and it was overpowering. I reduced to 10, and the balance was pretty good, but I decided to try backing off a bit more this time around.
• The rooibos adds a bit of interesting flavor, but it's mostly there for color. I'm sure there are better coloring agents out there, but this is the one that I decided to use for the moment.
• The ratio of bitter to sweet orange tincture is a work in progress. This is only the third batch with my new orange tinctures (See my post on tinctures.)
• As I mentioned before, I decided to bring up the bitter components this batch. I started with the previous standard of 25, 30, and 30 drops of wormwood, cinchona, and gentian, and then worked my up from there to taste.
• I try to take a scientific approach towards alcohol, but caramelized sugar is a different matter. It is pure black magic. I have a method that seems to work about 80% of the time. But half of the steps I take are probably just superstition, and when the 20% hits, the results are spectacular.

This batch turned out pretty well. The orange flavor is a little less in your face, and not too sweet. I might actually increase the bitter orange a bit next time while keeping the sweet orange at 1/4 oz. The increased wormwood and gentian are nice. I might eventually add more, but too rapid a change never seems to work well. The supporting flavors are better balanced with the decreased cloves. A few batches from now, when I've worked on the orange and bitter levels some more, I think it will be time to choose a new ingredient.

Tonight's Cocktail

Whenever I make new vermouth, my benchmark is natually a Manhattan.

• 2 oz Rye
• 1 oz Sweet Vermouth
• 2 ds Bitters
• Garnish: Cherry

Homemade ingredients: sweet vermouth, brandied cherry.

Tonight, I'm using Rittenhouse Rye, and Fee's Old Fashioned Bitters. The new vermouth passes the test so far. The extra wormwood combines with the 100 proof Rittenhouse for a pretty serious bite. I don't think it's too much, but we'll see what I think once I get used to this batch.