WINE WITH DINNER – Cooking Wine

Customers ask me occasionally to help them select an inexpensive cooking wine that can also be enjoyed on its own. We have plenty of them, but my favorite (and I cook with wine a lot) is a good quality “bag-in-a- box” wine. Sound odd to you, coming from a wine merchant with one of the largest selections of wine in Westchester? Well, the reason is quite practical.

I used to buy inexpensive wines in the bottle for cooking, but pretty soon my refrigerator was starting to overflow with partially filled bottles of leftover wines from various sources, including cooking wine purchases. Box wines don’t have to be kept in the refrigerator and they have a convenient faucet on them that allows you to draw off just what you need for cooking. The 3-Liter box is quite compact, so it doesn’t take up much room wherever it is stored (preferably not in an area that gets hot).

My favorite white box cooking wine is Hardys Stamp of Australia Chardonnay, which I keep in the refrigerator, and my favorite red box cooking wine is the Hardys Shiraz, which I keep down in the basement. When I want to draw off some white wine to cook with, I just open the refrigerator, glass in hand, and there it is! Some goes into the cooking and some goes into the cook! I usually draw my red cooking wine from the basement into a small carafe.

Now comes the good part. Each box holds the equivalent of four 750 ml bottles, so, at a cost of $18.99 per box, that means my cooking wine is costing me less than $4.75 per bottle! And, since no air gets into the bag inside the box when you draw off the wine, the wine, if stored in a cool place, stays fresh for a month or longer!

Life is a compromise and I’ve found this one to be perfect for a person like me who cooks a lot with wine. - Jay Roelof