In the interest of sharing important slices of life from my time as Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station’s bartender, I give you the recipe for “Enhanced” Sangria, AKA Mechanics’ Juice.
- Accidentally freeze an entire airdrop pallet of wine so that you have enough broken bottles that need to be consumed NOW so that this recipe’s portions make sense.
- Procure a reasonably clean 5 gallon bucket*. At the very least, a bucket free of detritus. Add the booze in the right order and you don’t have to worry much about disinfecting things.
- Add one 750ml bottle, each, of the following boozes: gin, light rum, tequila, triple sec, vodka.
- Add three bags of frozen fruit and several sliced oranges. Fresh fruit won’t last forever and you might as well use it here instead of throwing it out.
- Fill the remainder of bucket with red wine. Try to strain out the broken glass, chunks of cork, and label before dropping them in.
- Let sit for roughly 24 hours. DO NOT PUT THE BUCKET OUTSIDE IN THE SUBZERO TEMPS. Freezing things is why you’re making this in the first place.
- Hide the sharp implements and serve to the unsuspecting by the pitcher.
NOTE: A single person should not consume an entire pitcher of this.
Of course, that happened. This is the reason that there is a brilliant scarlet stain on the wall of one of the bedrooms in the Elevated Station. Someone had “an incident” and that stain is FOREVER I tell you. We’d only taken occupancy of the new station about a week beforehand, so this was the first ding in the fender if you will.
I take some solace it wasn’t me, but I did make the sangria that caused it. Sorry about that, US Antarctic Program.
* This recipe can be easily scaled up to for 55gal Rubbermaid wheelie trashcan. I know this because we had more frozen wine left over and repeated the experiment on a more epic scale.