Now You’re Cooking (with Wine)!

The story is well worn. On Julia Child’s Boston-based television cooking show, she would toss back a bit of wine while cooking with it. She insisted on drinking on air; the producers were horrified, but Julia had her own agenda, her own history to live out.

Child had adopted a robust life of wine and haute cuisine during her billet in Europe for the ISS, precursor to the CIA. With a foundation of skilled cookery gleaned from her sister-in-law and later from her friend Simone Beck, she had suffered through years at the Paris-based Cordon Bleu, sneered at by misogynist teachers.

As may have been expected from a rebellious, hard-partying social SoCal girl, her infatuation for wine evolved alongside her brilliance in the kitchen. In truth, Julia liked her bourbon just fine too; she was catholic in her tastes. She loved wine in her food, and she loved wine in her chefs too. Her beloved husband, Paul, was her teacher in the realm of European wine; the two of them threw nearly constant dinners for friends and family.

Best of all, Julia was unfussy—about food, about wine, about cooking, even (to a degree that puts her at odds with today’s Chez Panisse-inspired current culinary scene) about ingredients. Not so much cooking equipment; there she spared no expense.

But she was welcoming to many different kinds of wine and was an early champion of California wine. She would drink and cook with Napa cabernet as easily as with French Bordeaux. Wisely, she counseled her viewers and readers not to spend too much on their cooking wine but to cook with nothing that you wouldn’t be willing to drink by itself if the meal turned out to be a failure.

That perhaps sums up the simplest advice when it comes to cooking with wine: don’t use it if you’re not willing to drink it. So-called “cooking wine” from the store is wretched refuse, thin and unpalatable, insultingly salted to make it undrinkable for the kitchen staff. Think I’m kidding? Cooking wine is purposely over-salted so the help doesn’t end up passed out on the veranda. If your kitchen staff (you have one of those, right?) is that desperate for a drink, get them one and then hire other help in the future.

Nevertheless, there is a point of diminishing returns for wines you intend to dump into a hot pan; your favored bottle of Opus One is overkill, like running over a bug repeatedly with your car. The inexpensive common store brands (think Yellow Tail) might be perfectly decent choices, though they have a bit more sugar in them than most wines. If the recipe calls for a dry red wine, Yellow Tail (and many of the world’s other everyday wines have followed suit) offers their red wines with distinct sweetness to them, and that may alter the flavors in your dish. Maybe for the better, but who can say?

One of my chef mentors once told me that his red wine choice was based simply upon color, the darker the better. As always, he was partly misleading me for his own amusement, but it’s not a wholly crazy idea. Darkly colored red wines typically have a bit more texture to them; both the texture and color tend to hang in the pan when you’re reducing down a sauce. Malbec, Shiraz, Petite Syrah, even Zinfandel, can provide plenty of each.

Some recipes–think Childs’ signature Coq au Vin–call for a particular wine; red Burgundy was supposed to enrich Julia’s pet dish. Light pinot noir, the flavor of inexpensive Burgundy, may have been there more to help break down the stringy tissue of a cock (coq) or old rooster than to flavor it, but Child was not too worried about the wine. Her later versions allow for Burgundy, Chianti or California mountain red. Don’t be concerned that you can’t find that last one; that’s a good thing. Her earlier recipes evinced even less concern with the wine. I guarantee you that she and Paul were drinking far above that grade back then.

I’m no chef; I’m not sure I can be trusted with more than one pan at a time. But while each particular wine you put in your coq au vin will flavor it in a distinct way, few of them are “wrong.” They just make it taste differently. Cooking concentrates liquids; whatever flavor your wine has is going to seem a bit more concentrated when it’s been in a roasting dish.

More often the recipe just says red wine or white wine; and most recipes today are pretty flexible about the wine you use. Those that aren’t often recommend that you use the wine of the region where the dish originates. You could do that. Or not. But, as Julia would say, make sure it’s an appropriate consolation prize if dinner isn’t so grand.