Elderflower Rosé Sangria

Wash away the stress of your week with this juicy and delicious Elderflower Rosé Sangria. I have been suffering from a serious vacation hangover this week. It’s never a gentle transition from holidays back into your daily routine, somehow it always feels like you’re being waterboarded by responsibility.

Well, jet lag and the demands of adulthood have come crashing down on me this week and I’m just barely keeping my head above water. I can tell you that this sangria will help your Tuesdays feel more like Fridays. Best prescribed with a drinking buddy or a couple of Advil.

Can we digress to talk about the the total indignity of air travel for a hot second? I was literally 10 seconds away from missing my flight from Casablanca to Montreal on Saturday. As I sauntered toward the gate, at what I thought was more than an hour prior to boarding, the attendant was flailing her arms in front of her in the universal symbol for, “Nuh uh, honey.” Turns out my phone had not appropriately adjusted to the hour change in time zone and I was actually well past the boarding time.

Luckily, she recognized the total panic and desperation in my eyes and decided to let me sprint for it. I did my best Usain Bolt impression down the long boarding tunnel and down two flights of stairs, only to find myself in a tarmac shuttle with a bus driver and a couple with a newborn. We casually chilled outside the gate for a few minutes and then eventually set off at a glacial pace towards our aircraft.

When we finally arrived at the plane, it was fully occupied. I was the last person board. This has happened one time before. In high school, I was headed to England with my drama class for a theatre tour. My dad was chaperoning the trip but my mom had prepared all our requisite travel documents. When we got to the check-in desk at the airline, we discovered that my mom had accidentally equipped me with her passport instead of my own. Minor glitch.

Of course, we were at the Toronto Pearson airport and lived an hour away in Cambridge. At the time, cell phones weren’t exactly omnipresent. After dropping us off at the airport, my mom was on her way to her friend’s birthday party, half an hour north of Toronto. Panicked, we called the party venue and told them what happened. As soon as my mom arrived at the party, she was instructed to turn back and speed like a bat out of hell, the 90-minute drive back to Cambridge to get MY passport and try to make it to Pearson before boarding closed.

We pleaded with the gate agent for understanding. Miraculously, and thanks to arriving at the airport 3 hours prior to take-off, my mom made it to the airport in the knick of time. I checked in and was expedited through the terminal on one of those carts to board the plane to the ringing applause of my fellow passengers.

As I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, the flight to Morocco was pretty much an airborne pre-school. To make matters worse, I couldn’t figure out how to get my seat to recline. No one in my sightline had their seat reclined, so I just assumed that comfort was an impossibility. Where most aircraft seem to have a button on the armrest to shift your seat into a remotely humane angle, this seemed to be non-existent.

As I learned after landing, the reclining lever was harder to find than a good man in Ottawa. A small lever was placed directly under the seat, dangerously close to the life preserver. I spent the entire 6.5 hour overnight flight to Morocco pitched slightly forward. I have never wanted sleep more desperately.

On the way back, I knew where to find the magical comfort button and was able to find some solace in a 90-degree position. We were served two meals on the flight home. A miscellaneous meat dish served with a baffling side of peach yogurt, olives, bread, cream cheese, and chocolate cake. The second meal was breakfast, at 8 p.m., comprised of a slightly wet chocolate chip muffin that had clearly been recently removed from the freezer, more cream cheese and another dose of peach yogurt.

Honestly, who is in charge here? Regardless of culinary cultural differences, how does any of that make sense? It doesn’t.

Luckily, I have this chuggable sangria to help my blot out the memory of that experience. This stuff is good enough to pack into a sippy cup and take to adult daycare. it’s essentially adult juice. Easy to make and endlessly crowd-pleasing, come up with an excuse to whip this up this weekend.

Here’s to you and hoping you can find away to fly First Class! Cheers!

Elderflower Rosé Sangria

5 from 6 votes

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Elderflower Rosé Sangria

Prep Time

10 mins

Infusing Time

12 hrs

 

Course: Drinks

Keyword: Sangria

Servings: 6 servings

Ingredients

• 1 cup strawberries preferably wild
• ½ cup blueberries
• 1 bottle rosé wine 750 mL, such as Cave Spring Dry Rosé
• ½ cup St. Germain liqueur
• 2 cups carbonated or sparkling water
• Strawberries blueberries and dehydrated blood orange slices, for garnishing

Instructions

1. Trim and chop strawberries. Pour wine into a large pitcher or punch bowl. Add fruit. Refrigerate and allow flavours to infuse overnight.

2. Just before serving, stir in liqueur and carbonated water. Ladle sangria, including fruit, into ice-filled rocks glasses. Garnish with fresh strawberries, blueberries and a slice of dehydrated blood orange, if you like.

Recipe Notes

Recipe adapted from Walsh, Victoria. "Rosé Summer Sangria." Food & Drink. Early Summer 2014.