The Best Cooking Wine of 2024

Buyer’s Guide: Choosing the Best Cooking Wine

Cooking with wines is all about the smell and additional hidden flavor. It’s meant to create a flavor and aroma that only taste great if the right kind of wine is used, added in the right quantity, and cooked in a specific manner. As for the different options, you can find cooking wines in a variety of seasoning combinations. Choosing from the variety is tough and tricky, especially if you’re shopping for cooking wine for the first time. Here’s a buying guide to help you purchase the right kind for the right flavor profile.

About Cooking Wine

Cooking wine is a wine that’s formulated specifically to be used during cooking. Technically, it is a wine and you can drink it, but its high alcohol content makes it taste less appealing. The alcohol content in cooking wine is slightly high because the majority of it is supposed to evaporate once it burns off in the pan as you cook.

A lower alcohol level in the wine would burn off quickly and affect the flavor as well. Hence, if you’re cooking long-simmering food and love the slight tanginess of wine in every bite, you should go for special cooking wines. If you use a wine with a low alcohol content, you may end up with a burnt wine taste instead of achieving a nice underlying flavor.

Cooking wines also come with additional salt and preservatives to make them long-lasting. Salt is also added to the wine to enhance the flavor of any dish. Cooking wine can both be white wine or red wine, but you will most commonly find red cooking wine in recipes.

Benefits of Adding Wine to a Recipe

It’s fairly common to wonder what exactly wine adds to a recipe if you’ve never cooked with it before. Cooking wine is mainly used for adding elements of aroma, flavor, and moisture to your recipe. It is used for marinating vegetables and meat or for incorporating flavor at the start of the recipe.

Among all kinds of wines, red wine is considered to have a tannic and bold flavor. This adds a crisp and light hint of acidity to the dish as compared to white wine, which is milder in all aspects.

Every different variety of wine has its own unique flavor blend, qualities, and flavor profile that it adds to the dish. You should follow the recipe to bring out the right flavors and aromas. And, if you’re feeling experimental, you can also try out different grapes and seasonings to see what you like.

How to Use Cooking Wine

Recipes usually require wine to bring in the element of acidity. The acidity from different kinds of wines helps in breaking down meat during cooking and also seeps in to add moisture and softness to it.

Marinating is another use of cooking wine where you let meat or vegetables sit in the wine for some time. This gives a finer texture to lighter protein meats like fish and moistens through cuts of meat.

Some recipes require you to add cooking wine to the cooking ingredients while they fry or simmer. During this, some components of the wine evaporate through the heat, leaving behind a nice, tangy flavor and a strong aroma in every bite.

Cooking wine can also be used to make desserts. For instance, red wine creates an exceptional poached apple tarte Tatin, where the apples take on a glorious purple stain from the wine along with a subtle flavor.

How to Choose a Cooking Wine

Choosing the right wine to cook with can be tricky, but an easy way to start is to follow a recipe. Oftentimes, recipes tell you the kind of flavor a certain wine would add in depth and give you a starting point.

Other than that, consider the kind of dishes you will be creating with the wine. If you’re going to make coq au vin, you probably should go for a wine that you like to drink because wine shares the spotlight with the main ingredients in this dish. If you’re getting the wine for deglazing pans, you can use any kind, even a splash from your leftover wine, since it’s just going to add a layer of flavor and complexity to your dish.

For beginners, it’s recommended to stick with the kind of wine you like to drink for cooking. When you’re cooking wine, its characteristics change as the alcohol burns off and concentrates the flavors, so you need to pick a flavor that you’d like in its concentrated form as well.

Another thing to consider when choosing a cooking wine is whether you want a dry or sweet wine. Opt for dry wine when preparing savory recipes. Choose Chardonnay for dry whites and Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir, or Merlot for reds. For sweet white wines, consider Riesling or Moscato, while Lambrusco works well in sweet red dessert recipes.