I follow YouTube’s Glen and Friends Cooking channel. He’s a Canadian whose hobbies include researching recipes and techniques of cooking through the middle of the 20th century. A recent episode mentioned that for most of western history, the inclusion of wine in a recipe meant white wine, even with mammalian meat.
He explained that the botanical differences between whites and reds result in different effects. White wine intensifies the flavor the other ingredients. It says “taste THAT”, while its tannins and other compounds make red wine say " taste ME. Good to know if like me, you don’t enjoy drinking red wine and buy it only for beef dishes. Now I can stick with Rieslings both with and in my beef braises/deglazing.
TBH I tend to use whatever happens to be open. Very often, that will be a rosé
Harters
(John Hartley - a culinary patriot, cooking and eating in northwest England)
3
I suspect this may well be not true. It seems more likely that, in wine growing area, folk would traditionally use whatever was being grown locally. And, in non growing areas, whatever was generally being imported. In the UK, our imports were traditionally centred around the red wines of Bordeaux but this was expensive stuff, so definitely, something to drink, rather than something to cook with. My thoughts are that wine in cooking didnt start to become popular, even amongst the wealthy, until the arrival of French chefs who had fled their country during the Revolution, after their aristocratic employers were executed.
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BarneyGrubble
(Aficionado of Beethoven, and Latina singers)
4
Me too. I tend to not think of “cooking wine” as such (implying inferior). This is the same as chocolate.
Luckily, we almost always have open red, white & rosé, so I can choose by mood / flavor profile I want.
I’ve made mushroom sauce with all three, with the red providing a deeper, richer flavor, and white or rosé keeping things light. Same with tomato sauce.
