by Maggie Miller

Created on: August 27, 2009

It's one of those ineffable summer afternoons, with a drawn out, blazing sunset and a warm breeze lazily drifting in and out of the rafters on your back porch. Your thighs have stopped sticking to your patio chair and the deck planks feel smooth and warm against your bare feet. It's one of those afternoons that comes with all the glory of summer, including a pitcher of sangria, cool with beads of condensation sliding down the curves of the handle.

Good sangria is one of the most essential staples of summer. We'd sit on the deck and watch the bridge go up with a pitcher in front of us, wooden paddle protruding from a surface of ice cubes. Or we'd pour it into tea mugs and sip it while boiling in the hot tub once the temperature dropped.

But brewing up a good bucket of sangria isn't the easiest thing. I sorted through a slew of bad recipes before landing on and perfecting what could very well be the best sangria recipe out there. Strong, sweet, and fruity, this red sangria will give you a pleasant buzz and leave a fruit-punchy taste in your mouth long afterwards.

RED SANGRIA

Here's what you need from the liquor store:

A bottle of red wine (We suggest a 950 mL of Cabernet or Merlot.)

Apple schnapps

Peach schnapps

Triple Sec

Brandy

This seems like a lot of liquor, and for the most part you don't really exhaust any of the sources, but don't feel like you're wasting money. You can make a good Fuzzy Navel with some of the leftover ingredients, sip a glass of red wine over dinner, whip up a tasty Appletini, or slide into a slippers and your dad's old robe and sip brandy from a tumbler in someone's study.

The non-alcoholic essentials are as follows:

Orange juice

Pineapple juice

Sprite

Orange

Cherries

Lemon

Lime

I'd suggest buying two lemons, limes, and oranges if you want to add fruit for garnish. I'll explain why later.

Now that you have the foundation for your killer sangria, you're going to need a large bowl to mix everything in. We used fruit and vegetable Tupperwares that were pretty big, but we were on a tight budget and couldn't afford to snag a mixing bowl from the store.

You have two options for starting. Some recipes suggest mixing the orange juice, sprite, pineapple juice, and fruit first, and then adding everything else. This is good for integrating the fruity taste first, but when we started off with wine and fruit, it didn't taste any different. It's your call.

First, we sliced up an orange, a lemon, and a lime into wedges and dumped them into the bottom

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