Cooking with leftover wine

Have you ever gone to Costco hungry? Or stopped at a wine store right after getting a paycheck?

There are good deals out there on food and wine. Which means there is high probability of you overestimating your consumption and buying too much food, some of which you have to throw out in a couple of weeks because it spoils before you can finish it.

A fridge is a shrewd piece of storage—it’s where the “out of sight, out of mind” concept rings true. If you’ve ever found a 9-month old cheese or forgotten produce that has more mold on it than substance, you know what I mean.

Wine is no exception.

We don’t always like the wines we try. We don’t always finish the bottle, and tend to forget it in the fridge for a while. And then there are those occations where we celebrate something with bubbly only to find it stale the next morning.

There is a simple solution to not wasting wine, and that is to use it for cooking.

Any leftover wine will do, for the most part. It's just an ingredient that has alcohol. Left out for a few days or weeks, it won’t spoil per se, but it will basically turn into something reminding you more of vinegar than wine. But save it for braising, sautéing, or boiling, and voila! You just saved yourself some product and added taste in the process.

Dry white wines

These are obvious candidates for white wine sauces like Alfredo. Throw some white wine and cream into the pan, reduce it a little bit by boiling it down, and you’ve got a base for a white wine sauce that you can pour over pasta, for example. Cooking the white will break down some of its acidity and make the sauce taste sweeter.

Another way to use whites is for homemade salad dressings. One of my favorites is a mustard and orange juice base in which I pour a bit of lemon juice and a bit of whatever open white I can find in the fridge, then finish it with EVOO and basic salt and pepper. I’ve just created a healthy salad dressing that will have both crisp acidity (due to wine and lemon juice) and mellowness (due to oil).

Dry red wines

Leftover reds are very versatile. They make tasty marinating liquids for tough red meats--something you'd use in stews or for braising. They also boil down nicely-easy to create wine reduction sauces in various quantities.

Reds can be mixed in with water as cooking liquid for pasta and rice. This will give the starches a nice wine color and infuse them with flavor. Be careful not to use wines with too much spice (like Syrah or Zinfandel)--they can be overpowering. It's better to stick with traditional dry reds like Italian and French blends.

Sweet wines

Dessert wines can be tricky to cook with because of high sugar content. They are generally not good candidates for dinner sauces, except with pork. Pork tastes delicious with sweet sauces. You can use red dessert wine (like port) to create a port reduction sauce for pork. A sweet white wine works as a base for fruit sauces. Just be careful with amounts—experiment with the level of sweetnes.

Because so much of the wine boils down, it is not necessary to use expensive wines for cooking. That’s why leftovers are perfect—they retain  flavor while alcohol evaporates in the cooking process, leaving you with taste and saving you money in expensive sauce substitutes.