Taste test: the best mulled wine for Christmas 2017

by Great British Chefs 06 December 2017

How do you fill your house with Christmas cheer? Get some mulled wine on the stove and waft its festive fumes into every room! We drank our way through this year’s supermarket bottles to find the best.

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Great British Chefs

Great British Chefs is a team of passionate food lovers dedicated to bringing you the latest food stories, news and reviews.

Great British Chefs

Great British Chefs is a team of passionate food lovers dedicated to bringing you the latest food stories, news and reviews.

You can take your carols, your cards and your turkey – if there’s one thing that says it’s Christmas more than anything else, it’s a mug of steaming hot mulled wine. It never seems to appear at any other time of year, but the second December begins and we all get a bit cold at night, out come the tea urns filled with sweet, fragrant, warming wine. And because it can get a bit pricy to satisfy your mulled wine cravings at the pub, we recommend staying in at home, whacking a pan on the heat and getting all festive in front of the TV.

Fancy making your own mulled wine from scratch? Fantastic – take a look at our how-to guide for the best you’ll taste this year. But for those of you who simply want a bottle of something nice to sip on without any of the effort, our three wines below are just the ticket.

Runner-up: Sainsbury’s Taste The Difference Mulled Wine, £4.50

Many of the mulled wines we worked our way through essentially tasted like hot spicy Ribena, with no hint that the liquid might actually be made from fermented grapes. With Sainsbury’s’, you could actually taste the wine, which balanced well with the citrusy, clove-heavy flavour.

Runner-up: Aldi Gluhwein, £4.49

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This stuff is the real deal; proper spices, richly flavoured German wine and an unashamedly festive label. It also comes in a litre bottle, too, so you get plenty of festive cheer for your money. At 9% ABV it’s a little weaker than the other mulled wines we tasted, but that just means you can drink more before you start to feel too merry.

Winner: Waitrose Mulled Wine, £4.49

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First impressions of this bottle aren’t that promising – the understated label and simple description suggest this is a pretty middle-of-the-road bottle. But of course, none of that matters so long as it tastes good (you shouldn’t be drinking it from the bottle anyway), which this certainly does. It actually tastes like wine – something many of the bottles we tasted failed to manage – and kept the sugar levels down so the spices can come through. By far the most complex and grown up bottle of the lot.