A variety of cooking wines

When we talk about pairing or finding the ideal wine for a meal, sometimes it can be very easy, basically including the wine we want to drink in the recipe can be the perfect choice! A lot of recipes feature wine as just another of their ingredients.

We are going to give you tips today to get the perfect result from your recipes:

-    Dry white wines are perfect to include in fish or white meat dishes. Just think about some delicious steamed clams, cockles or mussels to which we add a little white wine when cooking them. It will confer some citrus flavour and aroma, and the perfect acidity to those shellfish. Try it using Albariño grape wine from the Rias Baixas region.

White wines with a relatively high acidity content can be used as a substitute for lemon, such as in ceviche.

These wines are also perfect for adding to sauces, white fish such as hake or sole. Try adding a little white wine fermented in the barrel, such as Chardonnay, and you will see how the sauce takes on the hints of butter, citrus fruits and wood. They also make a perfect combination with white meat, such as chicken.

- Sherry, fino and manzanilla wines have always been a wonderful ingredient to season mild stock and soup. We just need to recall those recipes for broth to which a few drops of fino wine were added to bring out the flavours. Sherry wines have a very strong flavour, quite often identified with salinity, meaning that if they are added to a recipe, they will confer flavour, highlighting the taste of your dishes, almost working in the same way as salt.

These wines are also perfect for dressing dishes combined with vinegar, seafood salmagundi, ceviche, vinaigrette, etc., or for marinading fish.

-    Red wines are perfect for cooking meat, since they allow giving more body to sauces and gravy and to enhance the flavour of stews. Just think about those oxtail stews or stewed cheek to see how wine plays a significant role in the recipe.

In these cases, when looking for thick dark gravy, we need red wines with plenty of body, well-aged, high tannins and hints of smoked wood barrels to make the dish that slightly bit more interesting.

- If we going to cook big game meat, such as deer or wild boar, we could choose an oxidative aged crianza wine (amontillado, oloroso, fondillon sherries) which are perfect for these recipes. Once again, they are strong, concentrated wines, and they therefore combine well with strongly flavoured meats. They are characterised by their roasted nut and woody flavours, and make the perfect ingredient for cooking those cuts of meat.

Marsala wine is a fortified wine from Sicily, which is often used to prepare meat dishes.

- Sweet wines, made with Pedro Ximénez or Muscatel grapes, for example, are ideal to pour over vanilla or orange ice cream, etc., but we can also use them instead of sugar. Think about French toast where wine is part of the liquid to soak the bread in, or instead of the caramel on a crème caramel.

We can use Mourvèdre grape sweet wines instead of red berry sauce, or Ruby Port, such as in a cheesecake.

Lighter sweet wines, such as young Muscatel, Sauternes or Tokaji can be served with fruit salad or baked apples or pears.

We can also make jelly or reductions to serve with cheese or pâté to balance them off.

I am sure that these tips will help you make perfect recipes, but make sure not to waste wine, just as you wouldn’t waste other ingredients. In short, wine can be part of a recipe and depending on how you use it, it will play a more or less significant role in the end result.