Wine & Spirits

I. If you won't drink it, don't cook with it. Reject the common myth that inferior wine and spirits can be used in cooking with no ill effect. A dish is only as good as what goes into it. Contrariwise, there is no need to use Louis XIII cognac to make brandied apples. As Escoffier writes, "Profligate extravagance is as bad as a restrictive economy."

II. Connect the foundations. Consider cooking with the same wine you will serve. Not the exact bottle necessarily,l but the grape at least. Even though such attentive touches are rarely noticed, they provide a semi-conscious but satisfying coherence to the meal. Think regionally.

III. Add wine at the beginning of the cooking process. The presence of alcohol in food makes it bitter, so give the wine time to reduce and the alcohol a chance to evaporate.

IV. Don't boil wine. When you reduce wine, simmer, don't boil, or you lose some of the virtues you want to preserve, including the inherent flavor of the grape.

V. Expect wine's alcohol, but not its character to evaporate. The more full-bodied a wine is in the bottle, the more full-bodied is its effect on the food with which you cook it. Character carries. Similarly, a light wine retains its sense of crispness and conveys it to the food.

VI. Cool red. Place a room temperature bottle of red wine in the refrigerator for twenty minutes before you serve it. Despite the prevailing myth, room temperature is too warm for red wine. A range of 60-65 degrees (16-18C) is about right. Avoid rapid temperature swings in any case.

VII. Warm white. Remove white wine from the refrigerator twenty minutes before you serve it. 58 degrees is ideal (14C).

VIII. Color outside the lines. When cooking or drinking, try red wine with fish, white wine with beef. The result might not please you, but break the rules anyway. Taste what happens. You already know the red wine classic coq au vin. Your experimentation might yield the next coq au vin Riesling. When you're ready, mess with the recipe.

IX. Use it in a year. Unless you have a 1952 Château Lafite Rothschild, your wine will not get better with time. It will likely get worse. Everything has its peak.