Cranberry Thanksgiving Sangria Recipe

Red wine, orange juice, cranberry juice, liquor, and fruit come together in this very seasonal Thanksgiving sangria recipe!

Make this Thanksgiving sangria once and you may be stuck making it every year. At least that’s what happened to me.

The first time I celebrated Thanksgiving with my now-wife’s family, we made sangria for everyone. It started with a recipe she had found online, but the truth is, I’m one of those people who rarely sticks strictly to a recipe.

Unless I’m baking, you can bet I’ll modify a recipe as I go. Often, it may be a minor adjustment — ignoring the advice for how much garlic or seasoning a recipe needs or playing with the cooking time and heat level. I’m no expert and still like to work from a recipe, but I see them as advice or starting points rather than rules to follow (again, unless I’m baking, which is admittedly a rare occurrence). Is this intuitive cooking? Maybe a little. It’s certainly something I’ve gotten more comfortable with over time.

This is particularly true when it comes to sangria. All bets are off. Sangria is just the adult version of the kitchen experiments you’d conduct as a kid, throwing a zillion things together and seeing how it tasted. No cooking is required; just sampling and adjusting. In this case, our finished product looks nothing like the original, with several ingredients swapped out and some noticable additions — liquor.

With this recipe, the most difficult and time-consuming part is cutting up the fruit to toss in. This is totally optional, of course, but it adds so much color and interest to the sangria that we always include it.

I’ve reached the point where I’m allowed to make other dishes for the Thanksgiving meal — no small feat to be granted permission to make the mac & cheese for a Southern Thanksgiving! — but the sangria remains our signature, the thing my wife and I are expected to contribute. At this point, nobody needs to ask us. It’s a given, as much a part of the holiday tradition as anything else.

I lost count of how many times I’ve made this sangria over the years, and admittedly each year its contents are slightly different. Nobody ever seems to notice though, as my tinkering and general guidelines lead to a pretty similar outcome each time.

Here’s what we’ve refined it to over time. But of course, I strongly encourage you to make any substitutions or swaps, and most importantly, to taste it and add whatever you think is missing.

We always make the sangria directly in a gigantic plastic drink dispenser. I recommend using one that can hold at least 3 gallons, unless you have a small family gathering.

Our family never finishes it on Thanksgiving day, and if you’re not going to be together for more than dinner, this recipe will probably create far too much. We work on it over the course of a couple of days. It used to disappear more quickly when we weren’t chasing after a toddler and more family friends would drop by around the holiday. (That’s happened less since 2020 for us.)

Scale this recipe up or down as you need!

Sangria Ingredients and Substitutions

Here are the ingredients this sangria calls for and what you could use instead — or omit.

• Apothic Red Wine Blend: Substitute any red blend wine (for subtlety).
• Orange juice: Essential. Choose pulp-free.
• Cranberry juice: Essential for tartness.
• POM Wonderful Pomegranate juice: Substitute a different brand, or add more cranberry juice.
• Fresca: Substitute Sprite or other grapefruit soda.
• Vodka: Substitute brandy, or omit.
• Clear rum: Substitute a darker rum or spirit of your choice.
• Whiskey or brandy: Use whatever you have on hand if it isn’t too harsh, or substitute vodka or rum.
• Simple syrup: Substitute brown sugar and stir to disintigrate or omit.
• Triple sec: Substitute other similar liqueur or omit.
• Oranges: Substitute other fruit or omit.
• Red apple and green apple: Variety is for color only.
• Fresh cranberries: Substitute pomegranate seeds or omit.
• Lemon: Included for color variety and non-essential.

The original recipe this riffs on calls for pomegranate seeds. I think they taste great in and with the sangria, but we typically leave them out because they’re expensive to buy on their own and annoying to remove from a whole pomegranate yourself. Plus, they sink while the rest of this fruit floats, which can both clog a drink dispenser and creates an odd dynamic to me with fruit on both the top and bottom of your glass.

Other Modifications

My wife wants to put all the fruit into sangria. If she were writing this, she’d tell you to double all the chopped fruit. But I’m usually the one doing the prep work and don’t think it’s necessary, and can tell you with certainty that we always have too much fruit. But feel free to go overboard if you prefer.

You could also cut the apple slices into large slices and use a cookie cutter to turn them into shapes such as stars. I’m not that cutesie with it, but it would certainly add to the visual appeal!

The original recipe that inspired us calls for serving this Thanksgiving sangria over ice. I’d rather have a fuller cup and more fruit. We often store the sangria in the colder garage overnight (where it won’t freeze but will stay cool), and our dispenser has a place for ice beneath the liquid to keep it cool without watering it down. I prefer that approach if possible.

We also do this because the container is too big to fit in the fridge, which is already stuffed for Thanksgiving. But if you’ve got space, by all means put the sangria in there!

I think this sangria tastes better after resting overnight. The fruit soaks up more. Be sure to give it a good stir if it’s been resting.

What to Serve with Thanksgiving Sangria

Other drinks, of course!

Not everybody likes sangria, and obviously not everybody drinks alcohol.

It’s always a good idea to have one or two Thanksgiving mocktails in the mix. Especially if you’re having a larger gathering, you never know if someone may show up newly sober, newly pregnant, or abstaining for any reason.

We also typically buy some extra orange juice and cranberry juice in case we want to add it to the sangria recipe, and then we’ve got more we can drink on its own (like with breakfast the next morning).

After consulting an expert, we also think these are four of the best wines for Thanksgiving. You could also try some of our favorite winter cocktails.

If you like this Thanksgiving sangria recipe, don’t miss our Christmas sangria recipe!