The History of Mulled Wine

Mulled wine is one of the oldest drinks still made the same way. The idea, heat wine, sweeten it, add spice, has been in continuous use in Europe for roughly two thousand years, which makes it older than almost every spirit and every cocktail.

Its history is really the history of the spice trade, told through a glass.

Roman beginnings

The earliest documented version comes from the Romans. Conditum paradoxum, a recipe preserved in the collection attributed to Apicius, combined wine with honey, pepper, bay, dates and saffron, and it was drunk warm.

The Romans carried the habit north as the empire expanded, and the practical logic followed them. Wine did not keep well, transport was slow, and by the time a barrel reached the Rhine or Britain it was frequently on the turn. Heat, honey and spice made it drinkable again.

That double purpose, pleasure and rescue, runs through the whole history of the drink. Almost every mulling tradition began partly as a way of dealing with wine that was not good enough to drink cold.

Hippocras and the medieval table

By the medieval period the drink had a name across much of Europe: hippocras, also written ypocras or hypocras.

The recipe was wine sweetened with honey or sugar, steeped with a heavy spice bill, and then strained through a conical cloth filter. That filter is traditionally the source of the name, sometimes called Hippocrates’ sleeve after the Greek physician, though the drink itself has no real connection to him.

What is worth understanding about medieval hippocras is how expensive it was. Cinnamon, clove, nutmeg and ginger all travelled from Asia through a chain of intermediaries, and their price was extraordinary. Serving spiced wine was a demonstration of wealth as much as hospitality, and recipes from the period read as far more heavily spiced than anything we would make now, because that was the point.

Medieval versions were also frequently drunk at room temperature rather than hot. The warming is not the constant in this history. The spice is.

Spreading and dividing across Europe

As spices became cheaper through the early modern period, spiced wine moved down the social scale and each region kept a version.

• Glühwein in Germany and Austria, the name meaning glowing wine, leaning on clove, star anise and orange.
• Vin chaud in France, generally lighter and less sweet.
• Vin brûlé in Italy, often with bay alongside the cinnamon and citrus peel.
• Bisschopswijn in the Netherlands, tied to Sinterklaas in early December rather than to Christmas.
• Glögg across Scandinavia, sweeter, fortified, and served with raisins and almonds. Its own story is in the history of glögg.

The differences are real but small, and they mostly track what each region already had: cardamom in the north where it arrived through Baltic trade, bay in Italy, sweetness where the local wine was thin.

Britain, Dickens and the bishop

Britain received the tradition early, through Rome, and kept it under its own names.

The most striking survival is the bishop, a punch of port and red wine with roasted clove-studded oranges. It appears in the closing lines of A Christmas Carol, when Scrooge proposes to discuss Bob Cratchit’s affairs “over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop”. The smoking bishop recipe is still made exactly as described.

Dickens matters here beyond the mention. A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, did more than any other single work to fix the imagery of the Victorian Christmas, and the drinks in it came along with the goose and the pudding.

The Victorians and the modern revival

The nineteenth century is where mulled wine becomes specifically a Christmas drink rather than a winter one.

The Victorian reinvention of Christmas as a domestic, sentimental festival attached a fixed set of foods and drinks to a fixed set of days. Spiced wine, which had been drunk throughout the cold months for centuries, became seasonal in a much narrower sense.

The second shift came in the twentieth century with the export of the German Christmas market. Weihnachtsmärkte have existed since the late Middle Ages, but their spread across Europe, Britain and North America as an imported format is recent, and it carried glühwein with it. For a great many people outside Germany, the market mug is where they first encountered mulled wine at all. Our German Christmas market guide covers what else is poured there.

A living tradition

The drink has kept evolving. Mulled white wine has gained real ground in the last two decades, and the site’s mulled drinks collection now includes rosé, port, perry and beer versions alongside the red.

The more interesting change is the pushback. Market glühwein is built on cheap wine and heavy sugar, and a generation that finds it cloying has driven demand for lighter, drier warm drinks: spiced ciders, warm spirit-forward serves, and alcohol-free versions built as proper recipes. Our guide to glühwein alternatives covers where that has gone.

Which is, in its way, exactly what the Romans were doing. Take what the season gives you, warm it, spice it, and hand it to someone else.