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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

This is completely misguided.

When you cook with wine you lose all the alcohol, which is the only constant between two bottles of wine. You're just left with the rest from which comes the taste.

There's no such thing as "cooking wine". Bad wine is bad wine. If you wouldn't drink it, don't cook with it.

That all being said, I personally think wine snobbery is basically bullshit and I think blind taste tests tend to support that view.

Still, a wine isn't bad because it's $5. Nor is it good because it's $30.

When I lived in the UK I'd often get by with the table wine from Tesco for under 5 pounds and honestly it was fine. I found quite a few decent bottles of Portugese and Chilean wine for under 10 pounds. Beaujolais wasn't more than 3-5 pounds.

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> When you cook with wine you lose all the alcohol, which is the only constant between two bottles of wine. You're just left with the rest from which comes the taste.

This is a myth. Even after 2.5 hours of simmering/baking, 5% remains. Flambeing leaves 75%, and a 15 minute simmer still leaves nearly half.

https://www.oasas.ny.gov/admed/fyi/fyi-cooking.cfm

You can almost always substitute 3/4 cup white vermouth (e.g. Martini) for 1 cup white wine. Generally tastes just as good, and you don't have to drink the remainder of the bottle.

>and you don't have to drink the remainder of the bottle.

You say that like its a bad thing.

Cooking with the wine is a great way for it to end up on the table surrounded by random glasses where "I don't want to trouble you", becomes "well, since its open anyway".

Oh, I'm not really a drinker, so I miss these things. Do you mean for getting girls drunk with plausible deniability?

Pretty sure nothing that creepy was intended. More like wine is often thought of a "special occasion" type of drink (especially in the US), and so opening a bottle is a non-standard occurrence at dinner time. If you're a guest, it may seem rude to ask somebody to open their "special" wine.

But if you are cooking with the wine, you already have the bottle open. Since an opened bottle of wine will rapidly deteriorate if you don't drink it within a fairly short time period (day or so), you may as well drink the remainder, thus put the open bottle on the table (where family/guests are gathered), and it will be consumed with relish.

Ah, thanks for the explanation. For whatever reason, the idea of finding ways to encourage dinner guests to accept food or drink is foreign to me.

Traditional stews like boeuf bourguignon or coq au vin actually cook for 3+ hours. So most of the alcohol is gone by then.

Right, this chart would support that.

Stuff like red wine sauces, whiskey glazed veggies, rum cakes, flambeed mushrooms, etc. that aren't cooked as long contain a very significant amount of alcohol.

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