Glogg

Gløgg is the Nordic take on mulled wine: red wine with sugar and spices such as cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, cloves and bitter orange, often strengthened with vodka, akvavit, rum or brandy. Raisins and peeled almonds come with it, and everyone adds as many as they like to the warm cup. The word is Swedish, shortened from glödgat vin, heated wine. Danes spell it gløgg, Swedes glögg and Finns and Estonians glögi.

Danish Wikipedia says 19th-century gløgg was closer to German Glühwein and much weaker than today's. The strong version came when people found that caramelised sugar improved it, so they set sugar on a grid over the pot and lit the fumes until the flame melted it into the drink. That method halves the alcohol and has mostly gone, but the extra spice stayed. Gløgg became a Christmas habit toward the end of the 19th century, and around 1900 Swedish distillers put bright labels with Christmas elves on the bottles.

Visit Copenhagen's own writer says you can't get near a market, café or bar in the city at Christmas without smelling cloves, orange, cinnamon and burnt wine. The tourism board describes an annual Danish gløgg championship held in November at the Torvehallerne food hall. Versions around town run from wine-heavy cups close to Glühwein to apple-juice and rum blends that a purist wouldn't call gløgg at all.