Bob's Blog: Cooking with bad wine

Everyone was full of praise for the wine selection, the lamb fillets were cooked to perfection and the atmosphere could be described as amiable. Then the conversation turned to cooking with wine. "I just use any old wine," ventured one of the guests, adding, "I even cook with corked and oxidised wine." Our six guests polarised into two groupes; those who were in favour of cooking with dodgy wine and those who were against it.

- "The flavour just boils off"

- "Nonsense, there will always be residual flavour"

- "I use undrinkable wine in cooking all the time and it is fine"

- "Perhaps you should get a RAT test"

I interrupted before violence broke out. I cook with wine all the time, but only wine that I would happily drink and often with the wine that was accompanying the meal. I was the first to admit that I had never added a dodgy wine to food because I thought it might compromise the food flavour. "Let's change the subject and I will do some research," I promised.

First stop The Oxford Companion to Wine, Fourth Edition. There is much debate about the necessary quality of cooking wine, some regarding the saucepan or stockpot as the ideal repository for any wine considered to nasty to drink, others insisting that only the finest wine will do. Wine with an unpleasant flavour will not lose that flavour in the kitchen, and corked wine is not advisable.

I then searched online and discovered an authoritative article headed “Should You Really Only Cook with Wine You’d Drink? The Truth About Cooking with Wine,” by Daniel Gritzer.

He has found from experience that the wine’s characteristics are very subtle. “In many cases it makes little or no difference at all.” I agree that the first big rule is to consider sweetness. “Use a sweet wine only if you want sweetness in the final dish,” he cautions. In my experience sweetness can become even sweeter as the wine is reduced.

Daniel’s second rule is that the acidity becomes more pronounced when cooked, which aligns with my own experience. He cooked five batches of coq au vin with five different wines including ‘wine product’ (wine with up to 30% water added); a light red; a heavier, oaky red; a red bag-in-the-box and an oxidised wine. “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,” he concluded. “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.” That is a slightly inconclusive result.

I plan to cook with the next corked wine I find and establish whether I can detect the distinctive, musty TCA character in the dish. I will compare it with the same dish cooked with the same wine that shows no sign of cork taint. Watch this space.