Ratting Myself Out on Ratafia

If you have more bottles of cheap wine then you expected what do you do?
I mean AFTER the whole bathing in chardonnay and sauvignon blanc deal. After you realize you could cook with them but it would take a while to use it up. Drink it? Well yes that's always an option but when you have other more delightful wines or spirits to choose from how on earth will you ever use up the cheap wine? Two dollar *o.k.* wine over 10 year old Tawny Port...I don't think so.
The thing about a 2 dollar bottle of wine that tastes *o.k.* and is pretty dang nice for cooking is that it's soooooo cheap. You could do something wild and crazy with it and if it doesn't work who cares? It's only two dollars! Hell I spend more then that on shoe laces every month.
You might have guessed by now that we found our selves with a couple of spare bottles of 2 dollar white wine. We had bought it as ingredients to make our Vin De Noix, and ohhhhhhhhh my don't get me started on the Vin De Noix, I'll save that for another post. Let me just tantalize your mental tastebuds by saying it's Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm-nastical.
But as it happened I miscalculated how much cheap white wine we needed to make the Vin De Noix and wound up with leftovers.
Muaaah ahhh haaaaaaa (my evil laugh, sounds better in person)
I decided to experiment. Whilst researching how to go about the whole Vin De Noix process I ran across something called Ratafia. Which has a funny name but intrigued me with it's description and use of...wine. They didn't specify cheap wine but that's what I made ours with. Ooops let the cat out of the bag huh?
We made Ratafia! My Mom is rolling her eyes now as she reads this cause I was the girl who screeched in loud piercing tones that I would NEVER EVER drink....boy...er...umm.....I changed my mind. Hee hee
Anyways the Ratafia is basically an infused wine deal. There's loads of information on the internet. To be honest I wasn't expecting choirs of angels to sing or anything when it was done and we tasted it.....but.....I might have heard a trumpet or two!!!
My bottle of cheap white wine was infused with a cup of super ripe nectarine pieces, several pieces of candied ginger, a vanilla bean, 1/4 cup of vodka and 1/4 cup of sugar and left to meld together in secret tastebud hypnotic ways in my fridge for three weeks...er.............shoot........my guilty conscience wants me to admit that we *sampled* it after one week and ohhhhhhhhhhh my it tasted good enough to *sample* again. You like that photo of our sample? Pretty huh?
We left half of it alone to wait out the rest of it's three week sentence, resigned to the chilly depths of our fridge to do more of it's magical melding.
But for now I can give it two enthusiastic thumbs up! Mmmmmm, better then a liqueur that can get too syrupy. This was sweet, fruity, refreshing and...dare I say it? Cheap!