Why anybody would want a bottle of cheap red mixed with some concentrated orange juice and a packet of spice mix is beyond me. Walk into any pub, any Christmas party at this time of year and you’ll be hit with it – a cheap lie that comes with the season, sweeter than the tears of Jelly Babies and hotter than a vindaloo. It burns.
Whatever its history, in modern times, mulled wine is simply a way of masking bad liquor with sugar, cardamom and cloves. In British pubs in December there are no happy smells of malty ale; no filtering fragrances of pork scratchings and salty nuts. Instead, there is an odour that wafts so sickly sweet, stirred on the bar and handed out in polystyrene.
Mulled wine leaves an unsettling residue on the side of cups. It’s dustier than a building site and contains a gritty substance that stains the teeth. What little alcohol that remains in the steaming cauldrons in which it’s concocted, amid shrivelled pieces of orange peel and last year’s cinnamon, is not just pungent, but aggressively acidic.
I don’t care if the Romans brought spicy wine with them all those centuries ago; I don’t care if Charles Dickens mentioned with subtle grace “a Christmas bowl of Smoking Bishop”. “But, even Scrooge liked mulled wine,” I hear you exclaim. Well Scrooge had been attacked by ghosts, so he wasn’t thinking straight.
There are many nice things that get burdened with a horrible festive garnish at Christmas. Cast mulled wine aside, for instance, and you might be unlucky enough to be handed a glass of mulled cider. It’s even worse – basically hot sick. Orchard fruit together with cinnamon and star anise might be an enticing premise, but in reality the drink is just bitty apple juice extracted from a metallic urn.
Seriously, I’m no humbug, however much you’ll suggest otherwise. I love Christmas. I marvel at fairy lights above frantic shoppers, enjoy the family niceness of midnight mass. Tidings of goodwill are super. So too is the connected happiness of festivity, the plates of deliciousness. But the season is a constant balance of cheer and dread.
Turkey, for example, I greatly admire. Though the meat is saddled with a shocking stereotype – “turkey is dry and bland”. That sentiment echoes from many a table, and each cry is upsetting. Turkey is only dry if you can’t cook. Learn how to use your oven. Baste it properly in butter; take it out when it’s still blushing pink. Wrap it in tin foil and stop under-seasoning.
When you’ve mastered that however, I would firmly discourage you from explaining your technique in next year’s round robin. Nobody has explained them better than Simon Hoggart. In short, they’re ridiculous. Round robins are lists of achievements more futile than a cardboard yule log.
So too are company-branded Christmas cards. Nobody wants to see that picture by “a pupil of Rembrandt” ever again. Christmas’s message should be offered up with feeling, not typed out en masse and distributed to clients. Large, successful businesses could at least stick a tenner in their banal cards – because let’s face it, we all still wonder, as we open our cards, whether that magic, fluttering moment will come to pass. It doesn’t of course, because we’re not 11 years old and nobody wants to give us money any more.
Most of us do still get presents, which is excellent news. Giving people small trinkets from John Lewis each year brings a wealth of merriment into people’s lives. But in the olden days, or at least in small shops in nondescript towns, assistants would wrap gifts up for you. Now, Christmas Eve, pre-pub, is a fight with rolls of paper and sticky tape.
However hard I try, I cannot make it look good. Admittedly, this is nobody’s fault but my own. I alone create this sadness.
But the worst thing of all about the festive season is surely cold mince pies. Hot, dripping in brandy butter or cream and crumbling onto your reindeer napkin and everything’s sublime. But cold mince pies ruin Christmas. The mincemeat hasn’t anywhere to hide when tepid or chilly. And the pastry doesn’t hum of butter – it sticks to the roof of your mouth. Worse still are people proclaiming their pies to be homemade. They’ve just emptied a jar of Tesco mincemeat into a bit of Jus-Rol. Putting egg wash atop the pastry doesn’t count, nor does dusting it with icing sugar. It’s technically lying, and Jesus wouldn’t like it.
Which brings me neatly back to mulled wine. Because I’m pretty sure that the son of God would agree with me on the syrupy stuff. When he turned that water into the tipple, you didn’t hear about him bunging a load of oranges and powdered spices into it, did you? No. Merry Christmas.
