Red Sangria

Red wine, brandy, and fresh fruit — sangre (blood) from Latin sanguis, 18th-century Spanish documentation, the 1964 New York World's Fair spreading it to America.

Sangria carries the oldest bloodline of any cocktail in this collection. When Roman legions planted vineyards across the Iberian Peninsula beginning around 200 BC, local inhabitants began mixing the resulting red wines with water, herbs, and spices — partly to purify unsafe drinking water and partly to mask the rough flavor of young table wine. The deep red color of these mixtures inspired the name: sangría, from the Spanish word sangre, meaning blood, which itself derives from the Latin sanguis. The Spanish term for the wine punch appears in documented form from the 18th century onward, though wine-and-fruit mixtures of this kind had been consumed across the peninsula for over a millennium by that point. For most of its history sangria remained a regional Iberian drink, associated with rural communities, street festivals, and Holy Week celebrations. That changed decisively at the 1964 New York World's Fair, where the Spain Pavilion served sangria from a kiosk called Taberna Madrid. American visitors discovered the drink in enormous numbers, and it spread rapidly through restaurants and home entertaining across the United States in the following decade. In 2014 the European Union granted sangria a protected geographical indication, confirming its Spanish and Portuguese origins and regulating its labeling outside the Iberian Peninsula.