"A mixture of blackberry, honey, spiced wine, and a touch of nightshade... perfectly safe, I assure you." - Talen-Jei of The Bee and the Barb in Riften, Skyrim

Inspiration

Velvet LeChance is one of the Bee and the Barb’s most iconic drinks, served only by Talen-Jei. In-game, he describes it simply: blackberry, honey, spiced wine, and a touch of nightshade. For this real-world riff, I use a game-accurate take on San’s Spiced Wine along with fresh blackberries and local honey, then finish with an edible “nightshade” (a pinch of cayenne pepper) to nod to the lore. Prefer it zero-proof like my bro Lycoslore (this started as his birthday drink)? Swap in non-alcoholic red wine to make the spiced wine.

Workshopping

San's Vino

A while back, my buddy Lycoslore had a surprise party planned for him, and I was brought on as the beverage consultant. The theme was one of his favorite games, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and I immediately got to work. I’ve known for a while that a few of Skyrim’s iconic beverages, including the Velvet LeChance, the Cliff Racer, and the White Gold Tower, already have quite a few real-life interpretations. Homing in on the Velvet LeChance recipes specifically, there’s a delightful combo with crème de mûre (blackberry liqueur) by The Geeky Chef, an amaro-boosted version from How to Drink, and a hot-honey version by the Experience Bar. They all looked tasty, but none of them answered the question I had in mind regarding the choice of wine. Some recipes are a bit more specific than others, but nowhere could I find a reference for which spiced wine Talen-Jei is talking about when he describes the Velvet LeChance. So I did a bit of digging.

In the world of Skyrim, if you were to search for wine, you’d likely come across “Spiced Wine,” a common loot item and purchasable in the game. The bottle reads “San’s Spiced Wine,” a reference to the San family and their family recipe. Luckily for us, The Elder Scrolls Official Cookbook has a recipe for this. It is essentially a mulled wine with specific spices. The recipe calls for spices like juniper, cardamom, and ginger, as well as boozy additives such as brandy and port. When consulted for what wine to use, however, it suggests a generic red wine, specifically a Cabernet. Score for the recipe! But even so, something about this still didn’t sit right with me. Does Skyrim even have these spices? And does Skyrim even have grapes?

Looking deeper, you’ll find that the cookbook takes some liberties with spices. Cardamom, ginger, and cinnamon don’t appear to be native to Tamriel, at least not as in-game items from any Elder Scrolls title. I don’t blame the developers for not directly adding analogs of real-world spices to the game. I imagine most potions in Tamriel are more concerned with medicinal effects than with things tasting good (just put a bunch of moon sugar in it, and it’ll be fine). I’m happy to let these spices slide too, because I’m a fan of mulled wine and I’d rather it taste good than be stuffed full of butterfly wings and garlic. However, I was able to find that juniper berries exist in Skyrim, and so do grapes, namely, Jazbay grapes. Grapes are required to make typical wine, so I was happy to find this detail. Even better, the in-game book, Agneta Falia’s Herbalist’s Guide to Skyrim, notes that these grapes are native to the “volcanic tundra of Eastmarch.” Instead of using any old Cabernet for our cocktails, we’d use the closest wine we could find to a Jazbay grape wine. Highly sought-after Italian Aglianico grape varietals are grown around the slopes of the extinct volcano Mount Vulture in southern Italy. Though the grapes grown closest to this volcanic region (at least in Basilicata) fetch a high price, even a budget bottle around $14 USD is enough of a lore dive for me.

With those details out of the way, the hard part is preparing the wine. Although I’m not at liberty to reprint the recipe here, you can snag a copy of the Skyrim cookbook yourself or check out the livestream where Lycos and I whipped up a batch of our own. Naturally, if you’re making a non-alcoholic version of spiced wine, you can grab a bottle of alcohol-removed wine and skip adding the port and brandy when following the cookbook’s recipe.

Deadly Nightshade??

No, silly, not Atropa belladonna. Not even the edible black nightshade (Solanum nigrum). The nightshade featured in this recipe is cayenne pepper powder, literally a pinch of it. In almost every iteration of this recipe, there’s discussion of the various nightshades out there, which are plants in the taxonomic family Solanaceae. These include Solanum lycopersicum (tomatoes), Solanum tuberosum (potatoes), and most peppers, including Capsicum annuum. Interestingly, black nightshade (not deadly nightshade) produces berries that can be consumed. There’s some debate about whether solanine, the chemical that’s bad for you, is present in non-deadly nightshade varieties at levels safe for human consumption. There seem to be folks on both sides of the spectrum here, so I’m staying out of it. But I did find an interesting paper on using black nightshade specifically for fermented beverages, so I’ll leave you with that. Maybe one day...

Cayenne pepper powder, chilli pepper powder, or ghost pepper powder: pick one and sprinkle it on top of your Velvet LeChance!

A Test Rim, Erm Run

I demoed this drink at the surprise party (to great success, might I add) with an adjustment that included a bit of mead as well. Although Talen-Jei didn’t specify mead in the recipe, he did say that “honey” was an ingredient. Last I checked, mead is made from honey. As I later thought about finalizing the recipe, I removed the mead from the requisite ingredients for a couple of reasons. Mead was a featured ingredient in another Skyrim-derived cocktail, the White Gold Tower, and adding it to the Velvet LeChance felt like it thematically lessened the focus on the custom-spiced wine. Mead also comes in many expressions, from sweet to dry to spiced and otherwise, and I didn’t have the resources at the time to settle on a particular type that fit well in this recipe. I hope to craft my own mead here at the XBar one day and perhaps include it in another recipe. At the party, we brought a number of different meads to try in this cocktail, and almost all of them worked to some degree. My favorite was a mead made with blackberry and lemon, which fit perfectly into this recipe with the muddled blackberries. Though the final recipe doesn’t call for it, you can add 0.5 oz (15 ml) of a mead of your choice to enjoy what we were enjoying at Lycos’s party.

After I removed the mead from the recipe, I spiraled a bit about how to “balance” this drink. Looking at it, I found a whole ounce of honey syrup (made by mixing equal parts honey and water by weight) and no acidity from any ingredient like lemon juice. Usually, I’d expect a recipe like this to be too sweet, but it wasn’t. Did this drink need lemon juice for balance? My first question was whether there are lemons in Skyrim, and at least according to the Elder Scrolls Online wiki, they exist somewhere in Tamriel. I typically don’t try to force a callback to game lore for balancing ingredients like lemon juice, but this time it worked out. Before committing, though, I checked my honey syrup to see how sugary it actually was, and with my equal-weight technique, it measured about 45° Brix, or 45% sugar by weight. That’s 10% less sweet than a typical 1:1 simple syrup. I did try adding a touch of lemon juice, but even a little bit introduced a flavor that distracted from the core of the drink, the wine. Overall, the XBar's Velvet LeChance recipe is spice-forward with appreciable flavors of honey and blackberry, and with lemon juice (even though it didn’t come across as less sweet), it seemed like the lemon contributed its own flavor rather than supporting the honey or the blackberry. When it came down to it, I opted to go without added acidity because there’s a little coming from the spiced wine, and thematically I wanted this to focus on the wine and blackberry flavors. Got a different opinion on this? I'd love to hear about it!

Velvet LeMocktail?

The non-alcoholic version of this recipe is quite simple. When making the spiced red wine, use a non-alcoholic or alcohol-removed red wine in place of a standard one. If you're following the recipe from The Elder Scrolls Official Cookbook, simply skip the last two steps: adding port and brandy. Swapping this in for the alcoholic spiced wine keeps the drink in balance without further modification.

Flavor Analysis

Cocktail: A flavorful array of baking spices and wine flavors bolstered by honey and fruity blackberry. Hits you quickly with hot pepper spice, followed by a dryness on the palate. Lingers comfortably with cinnamon-blackberry notes.

Mocktail: Similar to the cocktail in spice-forwardness and fruity flavors (but without the boozy bite). It runs a touch sweeter and a little drier.