Celtic new year, Samhain - celebrate the autumn harvest with medieval mulled wine

Its Samhain tonight, which goes under many names: all hallows eve, Halloween, 'all saint's eve', 'the night of the dead', autumn festival and many others.


Samhain is the Pagan Celtic New Year's Eve,  a time to reflect and to remember our ancestors and with the old year ending it is timely to think of new ventures and new beginnings.

The moon is full and her silver light is gracing our celebrations with her light.

Commercial ventures in Australia have us celebrating Samhain, or Halloween, at the same time as the northern hemisphere, on the 31st October, but this is Beltane in the southern hemisphere, a time for lovers and weddings, not a time for remembering our ancestors.

Celebrate the Celtic new year, Samhain, with mulled wine, good food and great friends. Carve out a pumpkin lantern for your entry hall and surrounded it with locally grown apples, nuts and pomegranates, all the bounty of the autumn harvest.

We're having our celebratory Samhain feast tomorrow night with friends,  the feast will be filled with traditional Samhain foods of the autumn harvest; beetroot, turnips, squash, apples, corn, nuts, gingerbread, cider, pomegranates, pumpkin dishes and lots of mulled wine!

Here's an ancient medieval mulled wine recipe, Ypocras, that we make to celebrate Samhain and Yule, make it to salute the autumn harvest and to warm your insides around the fire. We adapt the Gode Cookery website recipe and as they say "Ypocras was a very popular medieval beverage, and many different directions for preparation still exist. Also called Hippocras, the drink is named after the famous physician Hippocrates."

Ypocras or Hippocras

• 1 bottle (750 mll) of good Australian red or white wine
• 1 - 2 cups organic honey
• Two inch piece of fresh ginger, peeled and sliced
• Two cinnamon sticks 
• Six bruised cardamom pods, 
• Six pepper cloves, lightly crushed
• 4 whole nutmeg cloves
• Good grateing of a fresh nutmeg, use powdered if you don't have whole nutmeg
• 1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds
• cheesecloth or fine strainer

Bring the wine and honey to a boil; skim off any scum as it rises.

Taste for sweetness; add more honey as necessary.

Remove from heat, add spices and allow the mix to sit covered for 24 hours.

Using a ladle, pass the wine into another container through a strainer lined with 2 or 3 layers of cheesecloth to remove the spices, being careful to leave as much of the spice residue in the pot as possible. Make at least 1 month before serving. The older it is, the better.


Merry met all!