Those who were around last year may remember a few of us posting our personal recipes for Glögg then. Well, here's the deal: because my families recipe is superior to all other recipes I'm going to post it this year as well. For the uninitiated, Glögg is a Swedish holiday drink, a spiced and fortified mulled wine. It can be made many ways, but here is the best way.

(For a batch that makes 1.5 liters)

The ingredients you'll need:

• 2/3rds of a bottle of aquavit. You can use the Danish stuff in a pinch, but do yourself a favor and get Norwegian aquavit. I'm partial to Linie, and it's available in the U.S.
• Two cups Burgundy wine (cheap is fine, I've done it with good wine and it makes no difference. Carlo Rossi is cheap as hell and works great)
• Two cups Port wine (see above, no need to break the bank)
• 1/3-1/2 a cup of sugar, depending on how sweet you want it to be in the end.
• One cup water.
• Eight Caraway seeds. *Six whole cloves.
• Four cinnamon sticks.
• One smallish piece of ginger
• One cup of rasins.
• One orange.

Got all that? Good. Now it's time to turn that simple list of ingredients into pure, unadulterated awesome.

Take the raisins and soak them in the aquavit for about an hour, or until they start to swell, whichever comes first.

When they're getting close, put the water and sugar in a pot and heat it up until the sugar dissolves.

Add the zest of the orange to the water. Slice up the rest of the orange and eat it while you do the rest of the work, because there's no sense in wasting it just for its zest, and because oranges are a delicious treat that modern refrigeration allows us to enjoy in the winter. You wouldn't want to let the fruits of modern technology go to waste, would you?

Crush the caraway seed with a butter knife and toss them in.

Add the cloves.

Chop the ginger into chunks about the size of a six sided die, and toss them in as well.

Break the cinnamon stickes in half and add them to the mixture.

At this point you've got a cup of water with a whole bunch of stuff in it. It probably already smells pretty good. Let it simmer for a few minutes. After this part, watch your heat! We're about to add the booze, and we don't want that to get too hot... If it does, it stops being booze, and that would be sad.

So, once it's simmered for a few minutes, it's time to add the wine. Just dump it in. Let this mixture get hot now, let those spices start to steep in. And watch your heat.

Once that whole mix is up to temp, the last ingredient: The aquavit/raisin soak. Dump it all in. Yup, all of it. This is a somewhat stiff brew. If you've ever had mulled wine, forget it, it's nothing like this. This will go straight to your head.

At this point, you're almost done. Keep it on the heat long enough for it to get nice and hot (but no bubbles... That's when the alcohol starts to go away). At this point you have two options: serve it or bottle it. I usually do both. If you're not going to serve it all at once, take a couple of empty wine bottles and pour the mix in. This stuff will keep forever, so no worries there. I like to leave some room in the bottle and stuff a good mix of the solid spice chunks into the bottle as well, making sure to get some of everything. Not only does this continue to make the stuff taste better over time, but it also looks kind of cool in the bottle.

One last thing: If you bottle any, and want to reheat it to drink on another day, by all that is holy heat it on the stove. Microwaves just do something bad to it. Don't ask me why, I don't know the science behind it. It just doesn't taste right. Either pour it into a pot, or if you have a double boiler just use that to heat the whole bottle.

So, there you have it: My Jul gift to all of you, my family Glögg recipe. Make it, drink it share it. And love it.