Alcohol will dissolve some flavor elements from food that water and fat will not. So the result won't be the same. Probabaly not critical for most recipes. But broth or water is likely at least as good as fake wine. If the dish needs the acidity of wine, some lemon juice can be added.

The fact is that not all of the alcohol cooks out. If you are interested, the attached link contains a table showing the amount of alcohol retained in various methods of cooking. It may surprise you.

Depending on the needs of the recipe, I will substitute fruit juice or broth, when making food for kids or friends who abstain from alcohol. I don't go out and buy alcohol free wine just for a recipe.

Here is a link that might be useful: Link

I have used fre for cooking. I do not drink alcohol, so I wouldn't know the difference between fre and regular wine. DS tasted the chardonnay, red and merlot. He said the chardonnay wasn't too bad to drink, red was okay and merlot was not good at all.

Sorry, Cotehele, but I tried fre several times and found it abominable. I threw it out. I am a wine drinker but not a wine snob by any means. For instance, I would drink Livingston cellars but not like it. But I would drink it if that's all I had.

I think it's impossible to answer this question with a blanket statement. In general, if a recipe calls for wine when it is not the main focus of the dish, you could probably substitute an alcohol free wine without horrible results. But in that case, I would probably substitute another liquid and maybe get slightly varied taste results (apple juice and apple cider vinegar together perhaps instead of white wine for example).

On the other hand, if you are choosing a dish such as coq au vin which calls for a half-bottle of red wine (which by the way you cook for a long time and I do serve it to my child), I would never think of making a substitution, just pick a different recipe. To me it would be like saying can you substitute beef for chicken in fried chicken and still have it taste like it should?

That's my advantage, I don't know the difference, lol.

I don't like cooking with alcohol free wine...I don't drink the stuff...if I want to avoid the alcohol, I drink something else...fruit juice.
As for the alcohol remaining when you add wine to a dish...it's negligable.
Consider the amount of alcohol in 2 oz of 12% wine....then reduce that by 40% in cooking and divide that between 4 to 6 people...and you are at about the same amount in cough syrup or vanilla in whipped cream or ice cream.
Non A wine is mostly very expensive and not very good. If you have a "recovering" friend who needs to drink wine to belong to the grooup it's good...but in reality any that I have tasted is somewhere between spoiled, sour fruit juice and diluted vinegar.
There may be something better I haven't tasted...but that's my experience.
Go with real "something" and skip the fake wine.

I'd rather have San Diego tap water (oh the taste! oh the flavors!) than alcohol-free wine.

I've always heard that if it's not good enough to drink, it's not good enough for cooking. I'm not a wine snob, but I have tasted enough alcohol-free wine now and then, just a smidge to see if anything has improved as we have non-drinking friends and they bring these kinds of wine, to know it's unpalatable to me.

There have been some good suggestions about substituting something else...maybe someone will do a side-by-side food experiment and share the results?

This might be of interest: From Cook's Illustrated. Published November 1, 2008.

"Can alcohol-free wine be substituted for regular in cooking?

"Before heading into the kitchen, we sampled both red and white versions of two national brands of dealcoholized wine, Ariel and Fre. Neither brand had the complexity of real wine, but the Fre red and white beverages were a step up from mere grape juice. To find out what factors might contribute to the differences between the brands, we looked into how each producer removes alcohol from wine. Ariel uses a cold filtration process, repeatedly passing the wine along meshlike membranes to remove the alcohol. The resulting alcohol-free syrup is then diluted with water. Fre wines, on the other hand, are produced with a technique known as the "spinning-cone" method, in which the wine cascades down spinning, cone-shaped cylinders in a thin stream. Nitrogen gas is sprayed over this thin layer of wine to prevent any of the flavor compounds from becoming volatile and escaping. When the wine is subsequently heated to remove the alcohol, the nitrogen shield protects the flavors of the wine. In the end, the alcohol is reduced from 10 to 12 percent to 0.3 to 0.5 percent. Since some liquid evaporates in the process, a small amount of unfermented grape juice is added to the wine. Though sweet, wines that are dealcoholized with the spinning-cone method retain distinct wine aromas and flavors.

"To see how the dealcoholized Fre would stand up to the real deal in cooking, we made our Sautéed Chicken Cutlets with Shallots and White Wine Sauce (January/February 2005) and our Daube Provençal (November/December 2005). While all tasters could easily detect the sweet and less acidic notes of the dealcoholized wine in both dishes, most thought it was still quite acceptable. When we added some lemon juice or wine vinegar to cut the sweetness, both dishes got near-universal compliments. If you want to avoid wine with alcohol, the only national brand we found that uses the spinning-cone method is Fre, which is made by Sutter Home."

Thanks for the Link CindyB... I always knew that some alcohol remained, now I know just how much... And just about everything is a "significant concern to recovering alcoholics".

Rita