There are several types of cooking wines including Marsala, Sherry, Sauternes and Rice Wine. This guide is designed to quickly identify the types of cooking wines and in what dishes they’re used. Just so you know, the major difference between wines sold as cooking wines vs. regular drinking wines is quality. If anything, cooking with a regular drinking wine will give you a better tasting dish because the quality is much higher. There are 6 main styles of cooking wine. Dry white and red wines fall into the category of regular drinking wines. The best wine to use in your dish will often be one that will pair well with your meal. Dry red wines are best used for sauces such as Wine Reduction Sauce, Bourguignonne Sauce and Beurre Rouge. Dry white wines are used for everything from cream sauces, soups and to deglaze your pan. See the complete guide on dry white wine for cooking. Each oxidized wine has a uniquely different taste that will change the flavor profile of the dish.

For example, a Rainwater Madeira really can’t be a substitute in a recipe that calls for Marsala. Most of these wines are higher ABV, which means they add a richer taste to a dish than a dry wine. They typically last for a couple of months open, especially when you store them in your refrigerator. Try them all if you can and pick your favorite to use on a regular basis. This style of wine is almost always aged for a minimum of 10 years and the better, more viscous examples can be aged for nearly 40 years before opening. These wines can be reduced a little to create a rich caramel-like sauce or, in some cases, can just be poured over your dessert. These wines can last about a month or so open in your fridge. Red Ports include Ruby Port, Late-Bottled Vintage Port and Vintage Port. Ruby Port is a great everyday solution for cooking because it’s the most affordable. Keep a bottle around! Ruby Port will keep for a month or two and it’s awesome as a sauce on top of brownies, cakes and even on steak.

These delicately flavored, high acidity sweet white wines can be used both for desserts and delicately flavored sweet and savory fish dishes. best wine portThis style of wine is typically sensitive to light and air so it’s a good idea to plan to use or drink the entire bottle once you open it.where can i buy a wine station There are basically 2 types of rice wines available: Chinese and Japanese rice wine. where to buy dry wineThe Chinese/Taiwanese style isn’t technically a ‘wine’ because it has to be distilled to reach an ABV of 35 percent. best wine with seafoodChinese rice ‘wine’ is used to add acidity to stir fries. best affordable wine for gift

The other style is a Japanese rice wine called Mirin. Mirin used to be served as a drinking aperitif but is now only readily available commercially (ie lower quality). red wine dry lipsMirin has an ABV of about 8-12% and is salty-sweet; it’s perfect for glazes and Asian BBQ sauce. A detailed guide on pairing wine with chicken and other poultry that you might like to eat. Find out the best pairing options with many types of fish.Why does wine cause us so much anxiety? Whether choosing a bottle from the list at a fancy restaurant, or deciding which one to pour into a braise, we can't seem to do it without fretting over whether we've made a good choice or not. The conventional wisdom these days is to only cook with wine that you'd be willing to drink, though that raises even more questions: How do we define a wine that we'd be willing to drink? Would that include the free wine we'd tolerate for the buzz at a party?

Or is the bar higher than that—you know, like a wine we actually enjoy? And if the minimum quality is a wine we'd be willing to drink, is it worth paying even more to get a wine that is special; would the food be that much better? For the past few weeks, I've been cooking nonstop with wine, both red and white, to explore the effects of their flavor on a dish. I've compared light reds to big, tannic ones; fruity, tart whites to buttery ones that have spent plenty of time in oak barrels; off-dry (read: slightly sweet) wines to dry ones; cheap wines to expensive ones; and long cooking methods to quick ones.* What I've found is that while certain characteristics of a wine will have an impact on the final dish, in most instances those differences are relatively subtle. In many cases, it makes little to no difference at all. * I did not experiment with fortified and oxidized wines, like port, vermouth, sherry, or Marsala. Of course there are many factors at play, Just consider the thousands upon thousands of different wines available in the world, and all the different ways they can be used in food.

Some dishes may require just a tiny splash of wine, while others, like coq au vin, use it as a main ingredient. It would take years to explore all the possible combinations and permutations, so even with all my tests, the best I can offer are some useful guidelines and observations. One of the first tests I wanted to try was to take a close look at how wines change as they cook and reduce. I started with whites, selecting three different varietals: an off-dry (i.e., slightly sweet) Riesling, a dry, tart Sauvignon Blanc, and a buttery, oaky Chardonnay. I took a cup of each wine and reduced them down to 1/4 cup. As they reduced, the color of the whites darkened to a more orange tone; the Chardonnay, which started out the most golden before cooking, took on the darkest tone of the three, as you can see in the photo above. Tasting these wine reductions, two things jumped out immediately. First (and unsurprisingly), the presence of sugar in a wine like the Riesling has a drastic effect on how it tastes even after cooking, with the sweetness concentrating through reduction;

the cooked Riesling wasn't quite syrupy, but it was close. So, the first big rule of choosing a wine when cooking is to consider the sweetness: Use a sweet wine only if you want sweetness in the final dish, otherwise use a dry wine. Most recipes will specify whether the wine should be dry or not, so follow that guidance when using a recipe, lest you end up with a very different creation than the recipe author intended. The second thing that struck me was that, aside from sugar, the acidity of the whites had the biggest impact on their flavor when cooked. The Sauvignon Blanc, which started out very bright and tart, became extremely tart, almost lemony. The uncooked Chardonnay wasn't as acidic as the Sauvignon Blanc, but its acidity concentrated significantly during cooking, and was the most noticeable quality once cooked; its oakiness, while detectable, was a much more minor flavor once cooked. I repeated this test with two red wines: an oaky, jammy Cabernet Sauvignon with soft tannins, and a light, tart Beaujolais Villages.

Once reduced, both reds showed the same pattern as the whites, with their acidity becoming much more pronounced. That ripe, jammy fruitiness of the Cabernet Sauvignon helped balance some of the concentrated sourness of the cooked version, whereas the Beaujolais, with less ripe fruit flavors, was more harshly acidic once reduced. Isolating the wines like this was enlightening, but it's not a realistic example of cooking with wine, since other ingredients will have a big effect on how things taste. I needed to do some real cooking. To test the effect of a wine's flavor on a quick-cooked dish, I whipped up several batches of pan-seared pork loin cutlets, deglazing each pan with wine once the pork was done. The wines I compared here were the tart Sauvignon Blanc; the oaky, buttery Chardonnay; the lean, light Beaujolais; and the jammy, oaky Cabernet Sauvignon. I kept things very simple, whisking in some good gelatinous chicken stock once each wine had reduced, and finishing the sauce with some butter.

Sure enough, the same thing I had noticed with the plain dry wines was the biggest factor here as well: Their acidity had the biggest impact on the flavor of the pan sauce. Most notably, the tart Sauvignon Blanc produced a pan sauce that tasted like it had been finished with a squeeze of lemon juice, even though it hadn't. All the others also had a bright, acidic flavor—not as much as the Sauvignon Blanc, but enough not to require any additional acid in the pan sauce. That doesn't mean all pan sauces made with wine won't need an acid to balance the flavor, since that depends on the types and quantities of each ingredient in the sauce, but it supports the observation that a wine's acidity, above almost all else (aside from sugar), will have the biggest flavor impact. As for the pan sauces made from the red wines, they were incredibly similar. I had my girlfriend Kate blind taste them, and she was unable to distinguish between the two. Not only that, but the differences between the red- and white-wine-based sauces were more subtle than one might expect: While she could distinguish between them when tasting blind (literally blind, since the color is a dead giveaway), the only clear clue, she said, was the difference in acidity.

I've been working on a recipe for coq au vin, the Burgundian classic of chicken braised in red wine, and thought it was a good opportunity to explore wine choices in long-cooked dishes. Traditionally, coq au vin is made with red Burgundy wine, which is made from Pinot Noir grapes, but Burgundy is so expensive that it's not really an option for cooking unless you can afford to burn money. Instead I experimented with five different wine types: a fake cooking "Wine Product," which is low in alcohol and made from a blend of table wine, juice, salt, and other additives; an inexpensive lighter bodied red; an inexpensive full-bodied, oaky and tannic red; a medium-bodied boxed wine; and a bottle of spoiled red wine that had been sitting open on my counter for two weeks. These tests show that while there's some truth to the rule of cooking only with wine you'd be willing to drink, it doesn't hold 100% of the time: I sure wouldn't be willing to drink the "wine product," and I wouldn't want to cook with it either, but I also wouldn't want to drink that wine that had sat open for two weeks—it had definitely gone off during that time—and yet

, at least in this case, it was fine for cooking. When it comes to wine, there are many types of faults. The wine can be corked or have heat damage; it can smell of sulfur or vinegary acetic acid; it can be oxidized or smell like paint thinner. I wasn't able to test all types of flawed wine, and some may well risk ruining a dish, but this test showed that while a wine may be past its prime as far as drinking is concerned, there are some circumstances when you can get away with cooking with it. When I was working on my cheese fondue recipe, I played a bit with the wines in it. I tested the recipe with both light, tart Pinot Grigio, and buttery, oaky Chardonnay. And as I wrote in my story, I found little difference between the two flavor-wise, even though very tart wines are, in theory, supposed to help emulsify the cheese sauce better. I also tried both Pinot Grigio and Chardonnay at various price points, from cheap boxed stuff to expensive bottles that ran around $30 each. Once cooked into a cheese sauce, I was unable to appreciate any difference between the cheap boxed-wine version and the expensive bottles.