Wine should complement cuisine

Cooking with wine means more than a splash of red wine in your spaghetti sauce.

Not that there's anything wrong with merlot in the marinara -- especially if you'll be drinking it with dinner -- but there's more to cooking with wine than pairing red sauce with red wine.

For chef and wine aficionado Thom England, a culinary instructor at Ivy Tech Community College in Indianapolis, knowing which wine to use in which dish means considering flavor, acidity and bitterness.

"The wine that is used in the recipe should, ideally, be the one that is served with the course of food," he says, but first, consider the aroma of a dish. "The flavor of the wine should complement the aromas of the food."

Debra Gordon, co-author with her husband, Keith Gordon, of the new book "Wine on Tuesdays" (Thomas Nelson, $19.99), notes that "the key to cooking with wines is that you do want to bring it to a boil to burn the alcohol off" and impart a depth of flavor.

While Gordon won't necessarily cook with the wine she's drinking for dinner ("I don't know about you, but I'm not putting a $65 wine into the pot"), she and her husband will open an inexpensive bottle or use one from their cooking shelf, composed of recently opened and perfectly good wines the couple simply doesn't care to drink.

She's not picky about the wine she uses, as long as the color and flavor make sense for the dish. "If I'm making a white sauce, I'll use a white wine," she says; for a butter sauce, she'll use a buttery chardonnay and a sauvignon blanc or an unoaked chardonnay for fish. She'll use reds not only for hearty meats, but also for roast chicken -- to deglaze the pan and make a sauce from the drippings.

One thing is a no-no: Never ever use cooking wine. It's full of salt and preservatives.

But if a recipe calls for a specific wine, use it. "There's a reason they're calling for those types of wine," Gordon says, particularly when the wine defines the dish, as it does with a marsala or madeira.