I definitely enjoy drinking dry white wine--never really developed an appreciation of red. I also love Manhattans on the rocks, gin and tonic, and Tom Collins. However, as I grow older I react to all alcohol with a bright red nose and cheeks, very watery eyes and can barely stay awake after one drink. I choose not to drink with others because I look so terrible and I drink alone only if something horrible has happened and I desperately want/need to dull my senses. I didn't even drink after the deaths of two of my Siberian huskies last year. I am looking for a wine to add a little "something" to a recipe. Cooked wine doesn't cause any reaction for me--guess I kill all the alcohol during cooking. That's great because I love Bacardi or Southern Comfort cake. Nancy

I absolutely love Beringer's Gewurztraminer! it's a German wine, sweet, with a subtle taste of apples. Having been to both France and Germany and tasted the wines of both countries, I prefer those of Germany and Austria. I found this wine to be very indicative to the wines of Germany. "Gew�rztraminer = Gewurztraminer = Traminer Pronunciation: guh-VURTZ-trah-mean-er Notes: German and domestic versions of this white wine are somewhat sweet, flowery, and relatively low in alcohol. They're very good with curry and spicy Asian food. Imports from Alsace tend to be drier and are excellent with seafood and poultry."

I think lindac is correct. The point of adding wine is essentially to bring in some acidity. You are not going to get the complex flavors of a great wine in your stew - it will be cooked and transformed. That's why great restaurants don't use great wine in their cooking. And if you're doing a reduction, taking a bottle of wine down to maybe a cup, there is no reason to use anything great. That's the reason I suggested something fairly tasteless. For example, if you are cooking some mussels with garlic and shallots and wine, and you were to use a really grassy Sauvignon Blanc from Rueda say, you may find notes of bell pepper and grapefruit, and if you were to use a muscat or gwertztraminier, you would have floral and fruity notes and neither would really be great with the mussels. Sauvignon blanc from the Loire is a classic wine to use in that dish, but most of those, from Sancerre say, do not have the pronounced green flavors that some of the others do. With red wine it's a little more complex because many red wines are aged in wood. That is generally not something that enhances the flavor of a dish. As a matter of fact, whenever someone has done a little study of the issue, the simpler, fruitier wines were preferred. But your information on wine is very mistaken. "Cheap" can result from many factors, which could include the relative strength of the economy where the wine was made. Consequently, we can find bargains in the US that come from Argentina, whereas if their economy were stronger, the wines would be more costly. Lightly tapping grapes to release juice? Each individual grape? I promise you that nobody in the world does that. Some wines are made via carbonic maceration, in which case the weight of the grapes in the container crushes a few and the juice starts fermenting. The grapes at the bottom of the tank start fermenting inside their own skins in some cases. The new Beaujolais is made like this and it's also used in other areas to produce light, fruity wines that aren't meant to age and that are in fact good for cooking. In other cases, the grapes are in fact crushed and allowed to macerate with the skins. The juice is then drawn off. This is what is called "free run" juice. If the mass of skins, etc., is gently pressed, there can be additional juice that is squeezed out. That is no longer free-run juice, but is is not low quality. There are many ways of pressing the skins. For example, you can have an inflatable bladder that gently presses out the remaining juice. Incidentally, one of the wineries that uses this charges over $100 a bottle for their wine. And yes, sometimes the stems and seeds are crushed too. Some winemakers feel that the tannins and flavors that are obtained that way add complexity to the wine. Guigal in the Rhone for example, uses whole cluster fermentation, which means that he does not de-stem the grapes before making wine. Then when the juice is pressed, you get some of the flavors and tannins from the skins and seeds. His la Landonne goes for about $270 a bottle and it's entirely whole cluster fermentation. Dropping 1/3 of the crop is called "green harvesting". in that situation, bunches are cut off while still green so that the remaining clusters ripen more evenly and supposedly have more concentration. People around the world do it and people around the world debate whether or not it's actually useful. The idea is that lower yields produce more concentrated flavors. Well, you can accomplish low yields in many ways, including the density of your planting. But don't assume that all expensive wines are from vineyards that have been green harvested. I assure you that is not true. As far as headaches - that comes from alcohol. Sulfur is present in the grapes themselves as it is a component of some amino acids. THere is no science whatsoever supporting the claim of sulfites causing headaches, although there is an urban legend that won't die. Since I cook almost daily and have been doing so for many years, and since I always have open bottles of wine in the house, we've been cooking with all kinds of wine. I promise you that if I use a white or a red in my spaghetti sauce, you will most likely not know the difference. As far as not drinking it and not cooking with it - that's not a bad rule. However, I would even hedge there. Someone gave me some Yellow Tail shiraz. I certainly wasn't going to drink it but it did make a great marinade with some soy sauce, star anise, ginger, honey, and garlic. Cheers!

All wine will be acidic. That is one of its attractive properties in fact. And dry white wine will usually have the most apparent acidity because it doesn't typically have the tannic structure of reds. So adding wine to a dish will make that dish slightly more acidic, although not in the same way that vinegar would. So without tasting the dish, I don't know how "sour" it was. IF it was close to vinegar, then your wine was off. We drink wine every day and almost always use a little in a sauce, so it's hard to say what you did wrong. However, here are some suggestions: First, make sure you use a good pan. I always use cast-iron because it can really take high heat. If you are using white wine and/or cream, you can get an enameled cast iron pan. You can use stainless steel, but make sure it has a very thick aluminum bottom. Do not use something like aluminum because it will turn your sauce gray. Use the wine to deglaze, not to cook the meat. I am not sure how you typically deglaze your pans, but the most common way is wine or stock or both. In other words, cook the meat or whatever you are cooking, and when finished, remove from the pan. Those brown bits remaining are the key to a good meal. Pour off any excess grease, turn the heat WAY up, and just before the stuff starts blackening, pour in a little bit of the wine. Stir it around, making sure you pick up all the carmelized bits, adjust seasonings, remove from heat, and pour over the meat. So if you were making chicken or veal or pork, you can use a white wine and add a bit of Dijon mustard if you want. Do not use more than a quarter cup of wine or so. You can add some HEAVY cream as an alternative to mustard. Or replace a bit of the wine with some good stock. Or add a few tablespoons of butter. If you use red wine, eliminate the mustard or cream. If you want to reduce your wine, that is a different procedure. Pour the bottle into a wide pan and cook over slow heat until the liquid is reduced to about a cup. This will make a very thick kind of syrup, much more concentrated than whole wine, and you can add a tablespoon to your sauces. In fact, make a good veal stock and then do exactly this. Reduce 6-8 cups to only one cup, concentrating it. Then when you deglaze your pans, at the very end, add a spoonful of this to your sauce. It sounds like you left the meat in the pan (you said it was half-cooked) and then you poured in the wine and continued cooking. This is essentially making a stew - lots of liquid and the meat is cooking in the liquid. You get liquid from the meat, liquid from the vegetables, and liquid from the wine and you will have WAY too much liquid and way too much wine. If you want to do something like that, OK, but you need to work differently. That is the same principle as coq-au-vin, or chicken in wine, which is famous in Burgundy. The idea is long, slow cooking with lots of evaporation and it is better to make it a day ahead. They usually use an inexpensive pinot noir, but some of the best and most expensive restaurants in Manhattan use Carlo Rossi by the jug and nobody complains. Finally, a word about cooking wine. Do not buy the wine on grocery store shelves in small bottles labeled "cooking wine". That is usually crap. Instead, do like you did - buy an inexpensive bottle of real wine. Many people say that you should only use good wine for cooking - wine that you would drink. I would not drink a $7 chardonnay. Price does not always equate to better wine, but I drink wine every day and taste several thousand a year and I can tell you that under $10, it is a real challenge to find wine that I would care to drink. Between $10 - $25 is our average daily bottle, and well over $25 once or twice a week. But I am not going to pour a $75 cabernet into my cooking pot. And whatever anyone tells you, neither will the great chefs of the world. That $7 chardonnay, or better - sauvignon blanc or pinot grigio, will do just nicely, thank you. Once a wine has been reduced and blended with meat juices, seasonings, etc., nobody is going to identify that 1947 First Growth and cooking with it is just stupid. So feel free to use the inexpensive wines for cooking. You might want to avoid the more tannic and/or woody wines - e.g. the wines that taste slightly green and have wood chips used for oak flavoring, but otherwise, anything goes. Use an inexpensive grenache, a spicy blaufrankisch, a fruity zin, a young and earthy Rioja, or whatever strikes your fancy. As to your question of why a DRY wine - how much sugar to you want in your food? You can in fact cook with a sweet wine and if you are looking for that effect, it can be nice. Maybe pan-sear a duck breast and then deglaze the pan with a Sauternes into which you might have added some orange zest and juice. That could work. But you understand that your sauce will be sweet. And in 90% of the cases, you do not want sweet. So to sum: 1. Deglaze the pan AFTER the food is cooked. 2. Use a little wine/liquid and a very high heat so that most of it evaporates. 3. Add cream or butter at the very end, after #3, and don't cook too long - just until it thickens. 4. Use a wine fit for human consumption, not grocery store cooking wine, but you don't need to go overboard because the subtleties of an expensive wine are going to be lost anyway. 5. Whites - crisp dry wines with little oak are the most versatile; reds - something not too tannic or woody generally is the most satisfactory.