Sangria: Spanish Wine with Macerated Fruit
In Brussels, sangria is one of the few drinks whose name is settled by regulation: without a qualifier, only something made in Spain or Portugal may be called that. What the regulation doesn't mention is that the word itself most likely reached Spanish by way of English.
Sangria (Spanish: sangría) is a cold drink of Spanish cuisine: red wine in which pieces of fruit, mainly orange and lemon, macerate for a few hours with sugar and cinnamon, topped up with ice and sparkling water just before serving. It comes in a pitcher with a ladle, you fish the fruit out with a spoon, and the argument over whose drink it is gets settled somewhere other than at the table.
Where the Word Sangría Comes From and Where People Drink It
Every guidebook will tell you the name comes from sangre, blood, because of the color. The linguist Joan Corominas was more careful: English sangaree is documented as early as 1736 and Portuguese knew the word earlier too, while in Spanish the word for the drink doesn't turn up until 1832 - so blood is most likely a folk etymology, stuck onto a foreign word it happened to resemble. Today sangria is drunk all over Spain, but the family tree is a wide one: in La Rioja the festivals call for zurracapote, which lets peaches macerate for up to a week, in Castile there is the lighter zurra, made from wine alone without brandy, and Portugal has just as much right to the name as Spain. The same "wine plus something" family includes tinto de verano, mixed to order with lemon soda and no fruit at all, and the Basque kalimotxo with cola; for Spaniards both are everyday drinks, while sangria is a drink for a celebration.
How Sangria Got from the English Colonies to New York
For a long time Spaniards didn't think of sangria as theirs at all. Father Esteban de Terreros described it in his 1788 dictionary as "a drink invented by the English, much drunk in the English and French colonies of America," and legend throws in British sailors in the Caribbean who supposedly passed off rum with fruit and honey as fruit juice. The recipe didn't come back to Spain until the 19th century, with wine in place of rum, and its worldwide fame came from the Spanish Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair, where sangria became an unexpected hit with Americans; the guidebook version, that it was "declared the national drink" there, rests on nothing but other guidebooks: nobody says who was supposed to have declared it, or when. And the usual line about "roots going back to the Romans, who flavored their wine with spices" applies to half of Europe, mulled wine included; nothing connects it to sangria but the wine itself.
What Goes into Sangria and Why Spaniards Drink It at Home
The recipe calls for one ingredient you can't buy at the store: time. The fruit has to sit in the wine for at least two or three hours, better overnight, so the two can trade flavors: the orange gives up its juice and the bitterness of the peel, the wine soaks into the flesh, and the cinnamon ties the two together; the sparkling water or gaseosa goes in only right before serving, otherwise it goes flat while the fruit macerates. The wine is usually young and cheap, because an expensive one would be lost in the orange juice anyway, brandy is optional, and every family measures the sugar its own way. It is really mulled wine with the burner switched off and summer added. Which is exactly why Spaniards make it at home: a good sangria needs a pitcher, a fridge and an afternoon, none of which a beach bar has, so what often gets poured there under that name is a quick tinto de verano with a shot of vermouth and a slice of freshly cut orange. Spanish media come right out and ask whether sangria is "a drink for guiris," for foreigners; abroad it still sits right next to flamenco, and the industry couldn't care less about the contradiction, packing tens of millions of liters into cartons every year. If you want the homemade kind in a restaurant, ask for sangría de la casa and order a pitcher for several people; a single glass usually comes out of a batch made up in advance, and the fruit in it has barely seen the wine.
Sangria for One in San Sebastián
The best sangria I've ever had was in Madrid, at the Ojalá Restaurant, with my parents, and it was perfect. The one in the photos, though, is from San Sebastián, from the Bergara bar, where it came in a stemmed glass with ice and pieces of orange and lemon that had clearly been sitting in the wine for a while. It tasted sweeter than wine and less sweet than soda, the orange came through before the grapes, and the longer the glass stood in the sun, the more it turned into plain cold wine. It was a sangria for one, which means it came from a pitcher made up in advance, and in a bar that is the better of the two options. Going by the photos, forty-five minutes later there was a kalimotxo on the same little table. So at Bergara I arrived as a tourist and left as a local.
