How to Cook with Wine: Tips for Elevating Your Dishes

Early 20th-century actor and comedian W.C. Fields is credited with what is possibly the perfect witticism about cooking with wine.

“I love cooking with wine,” Fields said. “Sometimes I even add it to the food.”

Indeed, many of us spend time thinking about the wine we’ll serve alongside our meal (or drink while cooking it), but what about the wine that goes in it? If you’re grabbing a generic bottle called “cooking wine” from the shelf without giving it another thought, you could be missing out.

Wine is a versatile ingredient that can elevate your hearty stews and marinades and can also liven up desserts or a delicate fish. With that in mind, it’s important to understand how cooking with wine works and what goes into the decision to choose a red over a white or a dry wine over a sweet one.

Wine’s Superpowers: Flavor, Acidity, Moisture

Wine can enhance a dish’s flavor and appearance, add moisture, and tenderize meats. The chemistry of cooking with wine results in some interesting benefits:

Wine draws flavor molecules from other ingredients, enhancing their taste; it can also dissolve fats, which enables a food’s natural flavor to shine.
Because wine can break down fats, it makes for an excellent marinade.
Wine can dissolve oil- and water-soluble compounds, which makes it useful when deglazing (it can be more effective than water).
The tartaric acid in wine—a by-product of fermentation—can help prevent coagulation, making it useful in a cheese sauce to prevent the cheese from seizing up or becoming stringy in a fondue.

In addition to facilitating the interplay of other ingredients, wine can impart its own flavors to foods, with those flavors becoming more concentrated when the wine is cooked; think about a sweet wine that is cooked and reduced, for example.

Tannins, a bitter-tasting compound found in wine, can pair well with strong and hearty flavors like steaks and stews. Because tannins bind to proteins, cooking a more tannic wine with meats can cut down on the wine’s bitterness.

And tannins, which are often described as “astringent,” can also act like a palate cleanser when paired with proteins, according to an article in WebMD.

8 Methods to Use Wine in Cooking

Because wine is so versatile, you could plan an elaborate multi-course meal and use wine in every dish. Here are eight ways to use wine when cooking:

1. Marinade

The acidity in wine helps tenderize meat while also adding flavor. While it’s commonly associated with steaks, you can also use wine in a marinade for veggies.

For a steak or pork chop marinade, consider red wine, soy sauce, garlic, and ginger, plus a little sugar and molasses. For vegetables, make a white wine marinade with white wine, olive oil, garlic, and herbs.

2. Braise

A braise is a sear followed by a slow cooking in liquid; it involves a combination of dry heat and moist heat. Essentially, it’s a pot roast.

Wine helps with flavor enhancement, tenderizing, and retaining moisture. Add wine to your stock when braising, adding it to a pot with your protein and filling about three-quarters of the way. Osso buco, a braised veal dish, is a popular choice utilizing a hearty red wine, while white wine can work equally well with a chicken dish as it can with braised short ribs.

3. Sauce

Wine is a great liquid to use in cheese sauces and meat sauces alike. The acid in wine can help prevent cheese sauce from coagulating and can cut through the creaminess. In meats, the acid can help enhance flavors and tenderize the meat.

Consider making a red wine reduction sauce to drizzle over steaks or making a red wine bolognese. Or add white wine to your next fondue.

4. Deglazing

Deglazing is when you add liquid to a hot pan to help loosen up bits of food that have browned and stuck to the bottom. These caramelized bits are flavor-packed delicacies that make for a delightful sauce.

Wine is effective at loosening the browned food and then creating a well-rounded flavor as everything simmers and reduces. You can whisk in butter or cream as well as flour to thicken the sauce. Deglazing is good for lemon caper sauces or peanut ginger sauces. Or you can saute minced ginger, shallots, or garlic before deglazing and making a sauce to drizzle over steaks, chicken, fish, or a pork satay.

5. Steaming

White wines and rice wines are usually best alongside foods you’ll steam, in part because the flavors pair well and in part because they don’t add unwanted color to the dish.

Full-bodied white wines like an oaky chardonnay or a viognier work well in bringing out sweetness. Or if you’re making steamed mussels, a dry white wine like pinot grigio or sauvignon blanc complements the fish nicely.

6. Baking

Wine adds flavor to your baked items, which also benefit from some chemistry—the bubbles from sparkling wine can aerate a batter for a lighter cake, and acid can add a tartness like buttermilk would.

Consider using prosecco in a crumb cake, red wine in brownies, or white wine in a lemon bar recipe.

7. Poaching

Poaching, which involves cooking food at a low or very gentle simmer, can be done with eggs, fish, and fruit.

You can use white wine in a poached fish recipe with a lemon butter sauce or a glaze made with wine; or poach eggs in white wine. In cold-weather months, poached pears in a spiced red wine make the night a little warmer.

8. Use wine in place of oil or to reduce the amount of fat

This might not be the first use to come to mind, but wine can be used to reduce the fat content in some dishes.

You can substitute some white wine in place of olive oil when sauteing vegetables, or use a white or dessert wine in place of oil in a cake batter. Be careful when cooking with dessert wines and other sweet wines because they can become syrupy sweet.

5 Tips for Cooking With Wine

Now that you have some ideas of how to use wine when cooking, here are some tips to pull it off.

1. If You Wouldn’t Drink It, Don’t Cook With It

First, the Golden rule: don’t cook with wine you wouldn’t drink. In other words, don’t bother with “cooking wines”; for about the same price, you can get a “real” wine with a better flavor.

Cooking wines, usually located in the grocery store near salad dressings, typically include added salt and preservatives, which can affect the flavor of your recipe. Instead, think about the flavor of your dish and the flavors in your wine, and pair them.

2. Choose the Right Type of Wine

Just as you’d consider flavor profiles of the wine accompaniment for a dish, do the same when thinking about the type of wine to cook with.

Chicken and fish tend to pair with white wines, while beef and other hearty meats usually pair best with reds. Pork benefits from red or white. White wine often has light, citrusy flavors and reds often evoke fruits like cherry or peaches as well as notes of chocolate or coffee

Be careful with fruit-forward wines, often called “jammy” wines, which can become syrupy and too sweet. And finally, drier wines have less sugar—the yeast has converted the sugar into alcohol during their longer fermentation time—which helps you control the amount of sugar in your dishes.

3. Turn Water Into Wine

Use wine in place of water in some recipes. Get creative and cook pasta in a white wine (red will discolor it, though maybe you want that!) or use it when making risotto.

And as we’ve mentioned, wine is ideal to use when deglazing a pan, removing bits from the pan while also imparting a depth of flavor.

4. Timing is Everything: Use Wine Early and Cook it Down

In many cases, you’ll want to add wine early in the process and allow it to cook down to fully release its own flavors and to infuse other ingredients with flavor. As the wine cooks and reduces, some of the alcohol burns off and the wine’s other flavors emerge.

For example, when making a sauce, cook the wine until it’s reduced by about half before moving on to the next steps. When making a soup or stew, if you add the wine at the end, you’ll wind up with the flavor of alcohol more than the subtleties of the wine.

5. Use Non-reactive Pans

Acid can react with some materials and affect flavor. Copper, iron, and aluminum in particular can impart a metallic taste or change the color of acidic foods.

When cooking with wine, consider stainless steel cookware, which is nonreactive and also works with induction cooktops.

Does all the Alcohol Burn Off?

In short, no. Water and alcohol molecules bond together, so the alcohol doesn’t disappear completely—you can cook wine for several hours, but some alcohol will remain. In addition, the food you’re cooking will absorb some of the alcohol.

Alcohol’s boiling point is 173 degrees Fahrenheit. After 15 minutes of a dish cooked at that temp, about 40 percent of the alcohol remains. After an hour, 25 percent of the alcohol remains. Dishes that simmer for two and a half hours retain about five percent of the alcohol.

If you use a wider pot or pan, more of the alcohol will evaporate because of the bigger surface area, but again, it won’t cook off completely.

The bottom line: if alcohol is a concern and you prefer none at all, it’s best to pass and use something else.

Explore Sauces, Recipes, and More

These tips for cooking with wine can spark all kinds of ideas for ways to transform your usual recipes into something special.

Find out more with home gourmet online cooking classes, like Classic Sauces or Slow Cooker Revolution.

Or, if you want to pursue a culinary education, consider a degree or diploma in culinary or pastry arts. Escoffier offers both on-campus and online options, making it easier for you to find a way to fit school into your life.

To find out more about improving your culinary skills, try these articles next:

An Introduction to the 5 Mother Sauces
How to Make Lasagna with Ricotta Cheese
How to Make French Onion Soup

*This article was originally published on Feb. 2, 2014 and has since been updated.

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