Good evening and welcome to the bar...

This season we're going to be trying a slightly different format. As I'm going to be taking you through the world of different mocktails. It'll be a blend of reviews and information about non alcoholic spirits, mocktails of my own devising, and mocktails suggested by the community. Feel free to head on over to Twitter and tweet @dr_wilko to give me your ideas. I'm going to spending less time talking about the history of the cocktails and the spirits involved are more about how you go about adapting traditional cocktail recipes into mocktail form. As well as the more unique drinks you can make if you just try something new. 

Before I get started properly on this week's drink, I have to note that sangria is a protected term in EU law. So I think I might have to call my mocktails something like the non-gria or something like that. The long and the short of it is that sangria can be made within Spain and Portugal and be called sangria. Otherwise it has to have another legal name. Here we're just trying to imitate that kind of drink with a non-alcoholic form. So let me whip up one of those refreshing drinks view right away...

 Before you start making your cocktail. Make sure to cut the fruit. You will need one medium pear, one pineapple and one orange. Slice the orange thinly and then cut to make thin semi circles. Cut half of the pear into roughly one centimetre cubed chunks. Cut the pineapple into cubes. If you haven't cut pineapple before, you'll find it easier to work away around the edge removing the exterior and then you can easily slice the middle. Take a pitcher and fill it with a full bottle of alcohol free aromatized red wine. Add the fruit to the alcohol free red wine and about 250 millilitres of orange juice.

Now refrigerate for a few hours to allow the flavour to fully seep from the fruit into the drink. Or, if you're in a rush and need a refreshing drink straight away, make sure to add a few ice cubes to your glass.

So now that you have that refreshing drink in hand, let's talk about it a little. I must admit I've started off with a rather simple mocktail here. There's not much you need to do to change the original recipe, though the recipes for sangria are pretty varied depending on where you go in the Iberian Peninsula. When you're trying to blend together the ingredients to make a mocktail you need to pay attention to whether it will be sweeter or have similar flavours to the original drink. Unless you're going entirely off script and making something unique. By using a de-alcoholised wine, we still get the flavour profile you would expect from merlot as a richness and a bitterness. While in a glass on its own the lack of alcohol may be noticeable while you drink this; that disappears completely when you add in the orange juice. The sweetness of the juice cuts through the bitterness a bit. You still have that overall bitterness as it comes originally from a red wine and creates a very similar effect, a refreshing, cool drink you can drink on a spring or summer evening. And unlike with normal sangria, this one won't leave you with a headache if you have a glass too many. I hope you've enjoyed this slightly different take on the format. I'll leave you to polish off that refreshing drink. Meanwhile, I've got to go off and do an interview for a slightly different episode next week. See you next time.

Dr. Wilko's Campaign for Better Beverages is a production of Tinker Tailor Soldier Sponge Productions. It was written and produced by Dr. Wilko. The mocktails were mixed and drunk by Dr. Wilko. The music was George Street Shuffle Licenced under Creative Commons By Attribution 3.0 by Kevin MacLeod of incomptech.com. You can support this podcast on Patreon via the show notes and the website https://drwilko.org/patreon.