Last weekend, my husband and a couple of our kids stayed in our RV at a ‘haunted’ campground. Activities included a magic pumpkin patch, a haunted house tour and crafts. And who can forget the campsite decorating contest? (Which we did not win…hmmmph….we were pretty darn spooky, all the way down to the scary movie theme songs on the CD player.) It called for a big batch of our easy but infamous Halloween Bloody Sangria recipe!
While the kids were eating their 12 pounds of candy from campsite Trick or Treating (which yes, we did inspect), we sat by the fire drinking big cups bloody sangria served in spooky wine glasses.
If you are familiar with sangria, it is made with wine and fruit, and can be drank cold or warm. We usually prefer it iced, but in our neck of the woods, 50 degrees outside is cold, so I pulled out the slow cooker and got this fantastic adult beverage going. Before you know it, people were slowing down outside the windows…eyeing my wineglass.
At one point, later on, I looked up to see a man in a costume, strobe light under his face, standing 10′ from our fire, in our site….major creepy. Then he’d turn off the light and re-position himself and do it again. Maybe I should have offered him some of our bloody sangria, too?
How to Make Sangria
Homemade sangria is simple, inexpensive and can be made quickly. I came up with I feel like is the best sangria recipe after looking at not just a few Halloween cookbooks and researching just exactly what kind of red wine is good in sangria. You can adapt it easily to your tastes and strength preferences. You can also make white wine sangria, but save that for summer. (I have a recipe for that here.) You need to use red wine for the perfect Halloween sangria effect!
I’ll be making it again on Halloween for our ‘monsters’ (who fill our yard scaring the trick or treaters) to keep warm with!
Halloween Bloody Sangria Recipe
1 bottle red wine (We chose Merlot.)
4-5 cups apple cider (We chose organic.)
Mulling spices
Pour it all in a crockpot. Stir. Heat to your preferred temp and let sit to mull. Then enjoy!
To make your own mulling spices, I mixed together just a few spices: ground cinnamon, ground ginger, dried orange peel, ground cloves and a pinch of nutmeg. It cost about $2.50 for a bag that did three crockpots, but to make it on your own, far less and you can customize! (We really enjoyed having the smaller orange peel chunks, it was almost too big in the premade version.)
I need to come up with a fall sangria recipe next, because sangria is easy to make, sangria is cheap and you can even make a sangria recipe with rum or with other alcohols! I’ve made a perfect light white sangria for summer that has mango vodka in it. So good!
Enjoy your Halloween and we are sure our bloody sangria recipe will bring the adults to your house for trick or treat!
I’m going to have to try this, we love sangria!
It’s really good, and so easy. I made the mulling spices myself when made it again for guests on Saturday night. (So much cheaper and I could customize it to our taste.) They loved it too! As they were leaving, “Are you making it again on Halloween?” LOL They are coming to be scary monsters for the Trick or Treaters, so I promised that yes, I would….