Sangria, anyone?

One of the many wedding trends that S. and I are jumping on is the signature cocktail. Our reception will be primarily wine and beer, and neither of us are big liquor drinkers. Only a handful of our guests are hard-core drinkers/ partiers, and they can all make do with beer and wine.

I asked S. if he wanted to do a signature cocktail and he immediately came up with sangria. We both love sangria, and I've tried to make it (albeit somewhat unsuccessfully) once before.

So why, might you ask, am I crazy enough to try making my own sangria for 75 people? Well, I've learned a lot about sangria since my failed attempt nearly two years ago. I've learned a bit more about wine, and a lot more about food and cooking, too. I think a bright, berry-infused, fruity wine would be the perfect touch to our garden tea-party.

Last weekend, my mom and I made a stop at BevMo for some wines and fruit-flavored liqueurs to experiment with. Today, on my way home from work I stopped at the grocery store and picked up some fruit. I got lemons, granny smith apples, bartlett pears, raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries. We had five different kinds of wine but that included two merlots, and I only had four pitchers. After tasting both merlots, we opted to use only one.

I plan to wind up with a red sangria and a white sangria, unless one kind is a clear winner over all the others. We'll be tasting the final results at a dinner party next weekend.

Here's the recipe I used; keep in mind that it will likely need some tweaking. I will probably use this much fruit per 2 gallon jug of sangria, whereas here I used it for a 1-liter pitcher.

Per pitcher, I used:

-A half lemon, cut into wedges and de-seeded
-Four strawberries, tops cut off and cut into slices
-One bartlett pear cut around the core and into chunks (minus the stem)
-1/3 of a granny smith apple cut into chunks (de-cored and stemmed)
-Handful of raspberries (yeah, I know, real specific measurement, huh?)
-Handful of blackberries
-2 shots of blackberry brandy
-1 shot pomegranate schnapps
-1/2 shot peach schnapps
-1/2 shot raspberry liqueur
-1 whole bottle of wine. I used one each of a tempranillo, a merlot, a chardonnay, and a vinho verde.

We had found over the course of the last week, by throwing a splash of the fruit liqueurs into our regular drinking wine to taste, that the raspberry and peach flavors were too sweet and overpowering. The blackberry brandy is great, and since sangria typically has brandy in it, I opted to use a little more of this one than the others. The pomegranate was pretty tasty too, and I did want the raspberry and peach flavor in there, but just a hint of them.

I'm going to let it sit for a week (hopefully untouched) and then I'll post the results for you, and our winners!

Are you doing a signature cocktail? Are you going to make it yourself, if so?