The most tragic death of a good wine is being sacrificed to cooking. It's sad when a good bottle of Burgundy ends up in a pot of Boeuf Bourguignon. The stew will taste just as good whether you use a $40 bottle, or a $3 one, but all the wonderful qualities of a fine wine will be long gone after simmering for 3 hours. When chefs in cooking shows and cookbooks say that you shouldn't cook with the wine that you don't want to drink, they mean that the wine shouldn't be offensive, but it does not have to be perfectly balanced, complex, and interesting. Just like plain boiled pasta without sauce or butter is edible, but too boring to eat, so should the cooking wine be drinkable, but it doesn't need to be the wine you'd serve for a special occasion.

Wines that smell or taste badly should not be use for cooking. Ironically, the wines sold in stores as "cooking wines" should be avoided like the plague. They are bad wines to begin with, and they contain salt as a preservative to allow unrefrigerated storage after opening for about a year. In most dishes, the wine is reduced by boiling down to create a thicker, more intense sauce. "Cooking wines" are the worst performers for this common technique since their reductions are salty and unpleasant. Some drinking wines can be as off-putting as the "cooking wines." Watch out for extreme acidity, or wateriness that is sometimes present in cheap wines. A vinegary wine can make your dish too sour, and a watery wine won't give it much flavor. It is also a good practice to use wines with appropriate level of sweetness for a dish. For example, German Rieslings are wonderful for drinking and cooking, but some are too sweet for dishes that call for a dry white wine, like poached sole.

Another difference between using a wine for cooking vs drinking is the amount of tolerable oxidation. A wine reacts with oxygen in the air within a few hours, and loses the chemical properties that give it interesting aromas and flavors. Even if all the air is pumped out of the bottle, and the bottle is re-corked and refrigerated, the wine can only keep its qualities for one to two days, and can never be as good as right after opening. Whenever we don't finish a bottle of wine, I save leftovers for cooking. As long as I keep the wine refrigerated, I can cook with it for up to a month, or until it starts turning into vinegar. If a bottle sat in my fridge for too long, I taste it before cooking with it. I find using leftover wine to be the best strategy for the dishes where I only need a little wine to finish the sauce or deglaze the pan. For the times when I am making dishes that require a full bottle of wine, I always keep a few cheap bottles of red and white on my wine rack. Trader Joe's has some good, well priced wines that are great for cooking, like Charles Shaw for $3/bottle. The sales rack in your local wine store is also a good place to look for bargains that can work as a cooking wine.

Next time you need cooking wine, don't spend $10 on it. There are many wonderful $10 wines that belong in your glass, not in your pot. Instead, try cooking with leftover wine, or with $3-5 bargains.

Red Wine Beef Stew with Apricots and Prunes