Summertime sipping

I dunno about you, but if there's one thing I love drinking when summertime hits, it's gotta be sangria. And beer. See, I'm not a beer person, actually, when I was younger I only drank beer if I was too low on cash - which I happened to be, most of the time - because it was the cheapest. BUt I never liked beer, and still don't. Only with age, I find that it is the one thing I long for as a drink when the temps are so high. As well as sangria.

Ah, but this one drink is actually a whole other story. I have always liked sangria. It is the combination of fruits and sparkly drinks and wine, all seasoned with a good pinch of cinnamon and demerara sugar that make it all seem so yummy, much like mulled wine in the winter. When I was in my late teens, early twenties there was this place in Bairro Alto where everyone seemed to go to, only to drink their white sangria. I have rather fond memories of that place and tat white sangria on summer nights when the heat was just unbearable and you knew you we're gonna spend the next few hours locked up in a steamy hot place, dancing 'till your feet bled, or headbanging to the point you couldn't feel your neck. In the heat. So you knew you needed fuel for that. So you'd just grab a group of people and head there and ask for two big pitchers of that deliciously cold and aniseed white sangria and drank. Then you could go on and dance the night away. But not before you had trashed everyone you knew you were gonna see at the disco, and all those girls you found really annoying, and those guys who always acted as if they were god's gift to women, and the DJ's choice of music and if there would be any fresh meat in that place or not, and what would that stylish kid be wearing, and who would be snogging who, and did you really want to be seen hanging around those jerks... you know, stuff you were bound to talk about when your veins were flowing with white sangria and your brain was numb from the loudest of music, and the night was full of possibilities, and you were young enough to want to grasp them. I have very fond memories of that particular sangria. But I also have the best memories of our own sangria. Which we get to flavour to taste. And always tastes of summer.