For 12 ounces of cranberries, use about 1 cup of sugar. You may like to use part brown sugar. Lemon juice, orange juice, or zest of either are welcome additions. There is no absolutely standard American version; like anything else, every cook has their own variation.
It sounds like you cooked it too long, and additionally, the recipe may just be bad. If you managed to cook away all the liquid and end up with just wine-infused bacon, there was probably a point before then with a reasonable amount of liquid. Sometimes what people are going for with wine reduction sauces is really to have a lot of the wine flavor concentrated into some minced ingredients, with enough thickened liquid to hold it together a bit. If you crumble the bacon finely enough, and don't reduce away all the liquid, you might find you like it like that.
But it sounds like you're looking for more of a liquid sauce, and at the point when enough liquid remained, it was too thin. I'd might suggest just finding a more detailed, trustworthy recipe for a wine reduction sauce, and just adding in bacon (and maybe taking out some other ingredients).
Short of that, if I were going to try to do this without many extra ingredients, I'd:
- Save the fat that cooks out of the bacon.
- Crumble the bacon very finely.
- Keep plenty of liquid when reducing.
- Whisk together equal parts bacon fat and flour and cook until the flour turns a bit golden. (Basically, make roux with bacon fat.)
- Whisk the sauce into the roux and cook for a bit longer.
This is again a very fuzzy recipe. With the amount of fat bacon releases, you can definitly make more than enough roux to thicken plenty of sauce - depending on how much you reduce the wine and how thick you want the sauce, I'm guessing you'd only need a tablespoon or two of roux. If you feel you've lost too much of the bacon flavor, see SAJ14SAJ's answer for how to incorporate more of the fat without the sauce separating.
(In general, you have to be careful with vague recipes like the one you found - they'll tend to assume you know some things, so if you can't fill in the gaps yourself, it may be best to find a more specific one! And sometimes they're just bad recipes. That one tells you to fry bacon in olive oil, which is really suspicious - you don't need extra oil to fry bacon.)
Best Answer
I made a sauce using the ingredient ratios specified in the question. The sweet and sour in this sauce actually balanced each other and I thought this might invalidate any experiments until I considered that they also dominated the flavour of the sauce. In other words the sauce was a little too tangy (or tart if you prefer).
For the purposes of this answer, I'll make the following distinctions:
Note that I don't suggest that this is the accepted nomenclature. I think it is possible that the OP confounded sour with tart which may explain the specification of no additional sugar in the question.
Colour as a sweetener
As the Wikipedia article on Sweetness says,
The colour of this sauce became much duller during cooking, so I tested the effect on taste of using a green food dye. I didn't notice any difference in a side-by-side taste-test, even though the sauce with food dye did look much nicer,
I did one more test adding more dye and this time, to my surprise, the sauce with the more vibrant colour tasted very slightly, but nevertheless distinctly sweeter than the original.
I didn't quite believe this, so I taste tested this several times with the same result.
This led me to suspect the food dye itself and, sure enough, it tasted sweet due to an amount of glycerol in the ingredients. Despite invalidating my experiment, glycerol is neither sugar nor honey and as such answers the OP's question directly (if indeed the sauce was sour and needed sweetening). Adding to that the fact that the sauce now looks more appetising, I can recommend using green food dye whether or not colour has any effect on taste.
Salt
I also tested the suggestion of another poster, where salt is used to sweeten the sauce. I didn't hold out much hope for this technique, having experimented with salt on all manner of fruits a couple of days back.
Once again, I was surprised. Salt made a positive difference, although this time the sauce was no sweeter than before. Quite the opposite; sweetness was reduced (which is consistent with my earlier experiments). The sour note was also reduced, so sweet and sour were still balanced leaving the sauce tangy but not tart.
I adding a pinch more salt and now the salty taste came through and ruined the sauce.
I recommend adding salt if the sauce is similar to mine and excessively tart rather than actually sour. It is easy to overstep the mark when adding salt. I suggest making a little more sauce than actually necessary and putting an amount aside before adding the salt so that you can re-introduce some if you do go overboard.
Dilution
Finally I tested the advice to thin-out the sauce with water. This was the least promising result and it seems to me that sweetness disappeared faster than the sour taste. I tried various dilutions, but nothing compared well to the original and flavour was lost.
Possibly this could work if you dilute the sauce with something more flavourful than water, but I would recommend the other two methods over this if you want to stay true to the original recipe.