A Short History of Winter Drinking Culture

Winter drinking is not simply ordinary drinking done indoors. It has its own drinks, its own vessels, its own occasions and its own rules, and most of them are older than the cocktail itself.

This guide traces how the culture took the shape it has, and why it is changing again now.

Why winter calls for different drinks

Three reasons, and only one of them is temperature.

Aroma. Heat drives volatile aromatic compounds out of a liquid and towards your nose, and since most of what we call taste is smell, a warm spiced drink delivers far more than a cold one made from the same ingredients. This is the real reason clove, cinnamon and orange belong to winter: they are being used properly for the first time.

Preservation, historically. Before refrigeration and reliable transport, the drinks available in midwinter were what had survived since harvest: wine on the turn, cider from autumn apples, dried fruit and spice. Warming and spicing was frequently a rescue operation, as the history of mulled wine sets out.

Ritual. A drink made in a pan and ladled out has to be shared. That is a fundamentally different social act from opening a bottle, and it is the reason nearly every winter drinking tradition in Europe is built around a communal vessel.

Midwinter feasting came first

The drinks attached themselves to an occasion that already existed.

Midwinter feasting predates Christianity across northern Europe. The logic was agricultural: livestock that could not be fed through winter were slaughtered in late autumn, so early winter was the one time of year with a surplus of fresh meat, and the last of the year’s brewing and pressing was ready at the same time. A feast at the darkest point of the year was a practical response to what was available.

Christian midwinter festivals were laid over that pattern rather than replacing it, and a good deal of the older behaviour survived intact underneath.

From wassail to the festive table

Nowhere is that survival clearer than in wassail.

The word comes from the Old English wæs hæl, be in good health, and by the medieval period it described carrying a bowl of spiced ale from house to house at midwinter, toasting each household and expecting hospitality in return. Carol singing descends fairly directly from the practice.

In the English cider counties it took a second form that has never stopped: on Twelfth Night, villagers process to the orchards, sing to the oldest apple tree, pour cider on its roots and make noise to drive off bad spirits. It is a fertility rite conducted with a drink in hand, and wassail is still made to the same shape. Our British winter drinking guide covers it in more detail.

The Victorians fixed the calendar

The single largest change in winter drinking culture happened in the nineteenth century, and it was a narrowing.

For centuries these were winter drinks, made from November through February as the weather demanded. The Victorian reinvention of Christmas as a domestic, sentimental, tightly dated festival attached a specific set of foods and drinks to a specific handful of days.

Dickens is central to this. A Christmas Carol, published in 1843, did more than any other single work to fix the imagery, and it ends with a drink: Scrooge proposing to discuss Bob Cratchit’s affairs over “a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop”. The smoking bishop is a real drink and still made as described.

The effect was to compress a season into a fortnight. Mulled wine became a Christmas drink rather than a cold-weather one, and largely remains so.

The Christmas market and modern ritual

The second great shift is recent and commercial.

German Weihnachtsmärkte have existed since the late Middle Ages, but their spread across Europe, Britain and North America as an imported, packaged format dates from the late twentieth century. For a great many people outside Germany, a market mug is where they first met mulled wine at all.

What the market exported was not only a drink but a whole ritual: the deposit on the ceramic mug, standing outside in the cold to drink it, the collectable design with the year printed on it. Our German Christmas market guide covers how the system works.

It also standardised the drink downwards. Market glühwein is built on inexpensive wine with heavy sugar, and that is what a whole generation now thinks mulled wine tastes like.

Regional traditions that survived intact

Not everything was flattened. Several traditions kept their own shape entirely:

• Scandinavia kept glögg, fortified, cardamom-led and served with raisins and almonds in the glass. See the history of glögg.
• The Alps built a separate culture around après-ski, with drinks stronger and hotter than anything served in the valleys. See the alpine drinks guide.
• The Netherlands ties its season to Sinterklaas in early December rather than to Christmas at all.
• Scotland kept Hogmanay, where the whisky is poured neat and standing up.

The warm-cocktail revival

The current phase began roughly with the cocktail revival of the 2000s, when bartenders went back through nineteenth-century manuals and rediscovered that hot drinks had once been an ordinary part of a bar’s repertoire rather than a seasonal novelty.

What has happened since is a genuine shift in the category, and it has two parts.

Lighter and drier. Wine-and-sugar and cream-and-egg have made room for spirit-forward warm serves that are cleaner and quicker to make. Hot Apple Gin, warm gin toddies, warm spritzes, mezcal and sake serves. The modern winter serves collection is essentially a record of this.

Alcohol-free as a real option. Not the same drink with the alcohol removed, which tastes like hot juice, but drinks built from the start around tea, hibiscus, ginger and citrus doing the structural work alcohol used to do. The alcohol-free collection covers it.

Both changes come from the same place. Winter drinking runs over a long season, and the fourth mug of sweet red wine in a fortnight is one too many. Our guide to glühwein alternatives is the practical version of that argument.

What has not changed

Underneath two thousand years of variation, the core is remarkably stable: something warm, something spiced, made in a quantity that has to be shared, at the darkest point of the year.

The Romans warmed wine with honey and pepper. A German market pours glühwein into a ceramic mug. Somebody makes a hot toddy for a person with a cold. The drink changes and the reason for it does not.