What Is Wine and How Can I Use It?

White wine is the cook's everyday workhorse for anything bright and savory. It adds acidity and a layer of fruity, slightly tart flavor that lifts rich food and keeps it from tasting flat.

Forget the label and the vintage. What matters at the stove is dry versus sweet. A dry white has almost no residual sugar, so it sharpens a sauce instead of sweetening it. That is the bottle you want for nearly all cooking.

It belongs to the broader world of cooking with wine, where wine is used to deglaze a hot pan or reduce down into a sauce. The simplest rule still holds: cook with a wine you would actually drink.

Red wine is the deep, savory backbone of slow-cooked food.

Where white wine adds sharp acidity, red wine builds body. It lends color and a touch of tannin along with a rich fruit-and-earth flavor that turns a plain braise into something with depth.

As with any cooking wine, what matters is dry versus sweet, not the price tag. A dry red has little residual sugar, so it can simmer for hours and reduce down without ever turning syrupy or candied.

This page is about red wine as a cooking ingredient. For the wider picture of deglazing and choosing what to pour in, see cooking with wine. The old rule carries over here: if you would not drink it, do not cook with it.

Rice wine is fermented rice, not grape wine, and "rice wine" on a recipe card usually means one specific bottle the writer had in mind.

Sorting out which one is the single most useful thing to know here, because Chinese Shaoxing and Japanese sake both answer to that name, and sweet mirin is a third thing entirely.

It shows up across more than 180 recipes here, almost all of them stir-fries, marinades, and braises where a tablespoon or two adds savory depth and tames any raw or fishy edge.

The flavor is mellow and slightly sweet with a nutty, sherry-like note in the aged Chinese style. That gentle background is the whole point: it rounds a sauce out rather than announcing itself.

Port is a sweet fortified wine from the Douro Valley in northern Portugal. Partway through fermentation, winemakers add grape spirit, which stops the yeast early and leaves a lot of natural grape sugar behind.

The result is a rich, deep red wine that tastes noticeably sweet, at around 19 to 22 percent alcohol.

In the kitchen, port matters for two reasons. It reduces into a glossy, almost syrupy sauce thanks to that sugar, and it brings dried-fruit depth (plum, blackberry, raisin) that plain red table wine cannot match.

The two styles you will meet are ruby and tawny. Ruby is younger and brighter, with fresh berry fruit. Tawny is aged longer in wood, so it turns nutty and caramel-toned. For most cooking, an inexpensive ruby is the workhorse.

Marsala is a fortified wine from the area around the city of Marsala, on the western tip of Sicily. Like port and sherry, it has had grape spirit added during production. That pushes the alcohol up to around 15 to 20 percent and gives it a longer life once opened.

The flavor leans toward brown sugar and dried fig, with toasted nuts and a little tang behind it.

It comes in a sweet style (dolce) and a dry style (secco), and the bottle will say which. The dry is what you reach for in savory pan sauces. The sweet belongs in desserts.

Buy a bottle labeled simply Marsala, not the cheap "Marsala cooking wine" cut with salt, which throws off your seasoning and tastes flat.

Champagne is sparkling wine, made bubbly by a second fermentation that traps carbon dioxide in the bottle. True Champagne comes only from the Champagne region of France; sparkling wine made the same way elsewhere goes by other names, such as cava and prosecco.

In cooking, what matters is that it is a dry, acidic white wine with bubbles. The fizz vanishes the moment it hits heat, so on the stove champagne behaves like any crisp dry white, lending acidity and a clean, fruity lift to sauces.

That is why it earns its place beyond the toast. It goes into delicate sauces and airy sabayon. It even lightens a crisp frying batter, where a bright wine does real work.

Madeira is a fortified wine from the Portuguese island of the same name, out in the Atlantic off the coast of Morocco. It is made in an unusual way.

The wine is deliberately heated and exposed to air as it ages, a process called estufagem that began centuries ago when barrels cooked in ships' holds on long voyages.

That heating gives Madeira its signature taste. Think toffee and roasted nuts, with a note of dried orange peel.

It also makes the wine almost indestructible. Because it is already oxidized on purpose, an open bottle lasts for months without spoiling.

Styles run from bone dry to richly sweet, named after grapes. Sercial is the driest, then come Verdelho, Bual, and Malmsey (Malvasia), the sweetest of the four. For cooking, a dry or medium Madeira is the most useful.

Burgundy wine takes its name from the Burgundy region of eastern France, where the classic red is made from Pinot Noir grapes. A true red Burgundy is dry and medium-bodied, built on bright acidity, with cherry and raspberry fruit and an earthy undertone as it ages.

In American kitchens and on old recipe cards, "Burgundy" often means any generic dry red wine, sometimes a jug wine with no connection to France. For cooking that distinction barely matters, since the wine is there to add acidity and body rather than to be sipped.

This is a dry wine, not a sweet one. If a recipe calls for Burgundy, it wants a dry red.

Cooking wine is the salted, bottled "wine" sold on the grocery shelf next to the vinegars, not in the wine aisle. Salt and sometimes preservatives get added so it can be sold without a liquor license and kept on a warm shelf for months.

That salt is also the problem.

The honest take is that cooking wine is the weakest way to get wine into a dish. It tastes flat and oddly salty, and because the salt content is high you lose control of the seasoning in whatever you are making.

Almost any inexpensive bottle of real, drinkable wine does the job better.

Red Burgundy wine is simply the red version of Burgundy, the dry red made from Pinot Noir grapes in the Burgundy region of France. The "red" distinguishes it from white Burgundy, which is Chardonnay.

It is dry, not sweet. Expect cherry fruit and bright acidity over an earthy edge.

In recipes it behaves exactly like any dry red, so see burgundy wine for the full picture. That bright acidity makes it a natural for slow braises and pan sauces.

Sauterne is a sweet white wine, and the name causes some confusion. True French Sauternes, spelled with an s, is a famous and pricey dessert wine from Bordeaux, made from grapes affected by noble rot, which concentrates their sugar into something honeyed.

The American spelling without the s, "sauterne," usually means an inexpensive generic sweet or semi-sweet white wine.

Most recipes calling for sauterne mean a sweet white that adds fruit and a touch of sweetness to a dish. It is not a dry wine, so it behaves differently in a pan than a dry white would.

Rosé is dry pink wine made from red grapes whose skins touch the juice only briefly, long enough to tint it but not to make a full red. In the kitchen it behaves like a bridge between white and red.

It is lighter and brighter than red, with a touch more body and berry character than white. That in-between quality is exactly why it earns a place in summer cooking, where it builds a light sauce or poaches fruit without the heaviness a red would bring to a warm-weather plate.

Sweet wine is a catch-all term for any wine with noticeable residual sugar, rather than one specific bottle. It covers dessert wines like Sauternes and late-harvest Riesling, fortified sweet wines like port and cream sherry, and lightly sweet whites like Moscato.

When a recipe just says "sweet wine," it wants that sugar and fruit, not a particular grape. The sweetness is the point. It adds body and fruit, plus a glossy finish that a dry wine cannot give.

Claret is the traditional British name for a dry red wine from Bordeaux in France. It is not a separate style so much as an old word.

When an English recipe or an old cookbook calls for claret, it means a dry red Bordeaux, typically a Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot blend.

In the kitchen you can treat it as any good dry red wine. It is dry and medium to full bodied, with dark fruit over a firm tannic backbone. That structure is what it lends to cooking.

Sparkling wine is wine with bubbles, the family that includes Champagne, prosecco, cava, and dry domestic sparklers. In cooking the bubbles mostly cook off, but the wine's crisp acidity stays and does real work.

It earns its keep in sauces, batters, and light desserts. A dry brut style is the one to keep on hand.