Why wine

First, there are several types of cooking with wine. Wine may be used as part of the liquid to cook shellfish for example. Here you would want a high acidity white wine. Strong flavors and sweetness might detract. The wine serves much the same function as adding lemon to the cooking liquid. Then there are dishes that are finished with a splash of wine at the end, perhaps a sherry or other fortified wine. Here one is wanting a moderate taste of the wine in the dish, so the wine is added at the last minute without boiling so that the taste of the wine is not changed. Boiling the dish will cause loss of the desired wine flavors and possibly development of flavors you do not like. Then there are meat dishes cooked in red wine. Here you have to be careful not to choose a red that is too tannic or that has too much acid. If the liquid is greatly reduced for making a sauce at the end, this can become very important, and also a cheap red that has some sweetness can make the sauce too sweet. You just have to experiment with the type of wine used for long cooking. What is best for drinking many not be best for a long-cooked dish.

Stavo dormendo su un bancale di lambro quando il post di Meryl mi desto'

My 2 cents: I used to marinate meat for grill in a nigth-long red wine bath, and it worked well, expecially if the wine was tannic. Then someone told me to try beer, and it worked too, so I guessed it was the acidity of the beer. Weee, then again I thougth: why not lambrusco? A good grasparossa has enough tannins to match the el-cheapo reds I used to marinate in, and also enough CO2 to beat any beer. Moreover, it has it's own marked acidity, so I tried it out and the results are always more than good: tender meat, even easier to cook, and damn tasty!

Hooray!! Finally, a use for sparkling Lambrusco (a wine that provided me with one of the worst vinous experiences of my life). Three cheers for Vilco! ;-)

Mark Lipton

You are likely right on the money as far as boiling. I made the mistake of adding a white wine to a soup once and the result was off flavors.

Conversely, I have seldom have a bad result deglazing with wine (and the bad results have likely been the product of my burning the solid bits on the pan).

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OK, I gotta try that! That info jibes with a recipe suggestion I ran across recently for using white Zin in the preparation of Bolognese sauce. Thanks, Vilco.

Tom S

If you ever get to meet Vilco, he will introduce you to things that you would never think of as Lambrusco. Things like dark intense tannic wines (Il Moro was it?). He also swears by balsamic vinegar from Reggio (the bottle is not quite like the Modena one). And he will make you taste 60 month old (P.)-Reggiano like you never tasted before...

Two weekends ago we met with a bunch of IHV people near Parma, sure enough we started with L********... ;-)

Mi e' parso che Mark Lipton abbia scritto:

You like to risk your life, man ;) You probably tried the traditional ones, and probably they were from a famigerated producer in my county, who's now moving to higher quality standards: Cantine Riunite. They have always sold whole freighters of lambrusco overseas and to inland europe (they have been in some years the biggest italian wine exporters) and theyr quality has always been low. Now they've changed many things, and some of theyr wines are decent-to-good lambrusco: these are the three "cuvee' dei fondatori" and the "ottocento".

As Mike says in his post, there is also a new trend in lambrusco: no more sparkling young wines but structured, ageworthy wines who can stand a pair of years in casks and barriques and some more years in the bottle. The king of these wines is Moro del Moro, by Cantine Moro in Calerno di Sant'Ilario (Reggio Emilia): the wine guide of the famous italian newspaper "L'Espresso" gives it an outstanding 18 points for the 2000, and many other wine guides rate it almost at the top. It's obtained from grapes of Pjcol Ross and Ancellotta, both lambrusco varieties, the former being a forgotten one who's been re-discovered in the 80's by another producer ("Tanuta La Piccola", Montecchio Emilia, Reggio Emilia). A cherrish fruity nose where intensity exalts elegance, a round and pleasant mouth with few tannins and a good acidity after 2 years of wood and 3 in the bottle, closing with a long, fine, sweet final. If you can put your hands on a bottle of Moro del Moro, don't wait! BTW - It's priced around 15 euros here in the area, and usually you find it in the restaurants for 20 to 25 euros.

Try it out, and forget the worst vinous experience of your life :)

Mi e' parso che Mike Tommasi abbia scritto:

Yep: Moro del Moro. The first time I brougth it at a gethering it was in Chiavari, at Francone's, and was the 1998 with a 60% Pinot-Noir. Then they stopped using Pinot-noir and it became a full Lambrusco.

Yes, and the three quality colors used in Reggio differ from those used in Modena: they are (from best to lesser) Oro, Argento and Aragosta, which translate into "Gold", "Silver" and "Lobster".

LOL, i had to drive 200km to Piedmont to find a 60 months old PR-RE :) At least now I have the name of the producer: "Casello di Collecchio", 30 kilometers from here. As soon as my first X.O. Parmigiano craving arises, I'll be driving there.

And it was a nice one, too: "Otello" from Cantine Ceci, Parma.

I'm glad you mentioned

"Boiling the dish will cause loss of the desired wine flavors and possibly development of flavors you do not like"

This has certainly been my experience, so I try to cook low heat and short time (but at least 15 mins if possible). I didn't mention it but the red wines are worse. The though of concentrating tannins through reduction isn't a nice one but I think its more. I think possibly their are other substances which are changed by the heat. I'm actualy afraid to cook with more than al little red wine (less than 1/2 cup) for sauces.

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote:

I'm talking about descent 'cooking wines' you'd also drink. Not from the supermaket!

Meryl

Leo,

I started deglaz> >

It wasn't Riunite, but I can't tell you what it was. The situation was this: in Roma in '83, my traveling companion went to the market to buy some wine. There he tasted a red wine that he liked a lot and bought a bottle. He brings it back to the train (we were traveling to the North that day), unwraps it and finds that the merchant had "substituted" this bottle of sparkling Lambrusco. Ick!!! It was truly awful, no doubt explaining the "unusual" marketing technique. At least we kept our wallets during that trip ;-)

Thanks very much for the information, Vilco. It is now archived for later reference.

Mark Lipton

I have never paid attention to the amount of white wine I use; it has not been a problem.

Sometimes I have used a big red wine and gotten inconsistent results, so need to look closely into whether there is a difference between whites and reds. So, let's focus on whites.

The problem seems not to be in the wine but in the heat and the pan solids *before* deglazing; if you burn the solids, no amount of deglazing will bring them back. Chicken breast seems to be easy to burn. Sometimes I will strain the sauce to get rid of any solids, which may include burt bits.

I add liberal amounts of wine to the pan. I know that once the water-alcohol azeotrope starts boiling off, the temperature will be stable, so I crank up the heat to speed up boiling.

When it gets to a volume close to what I want (with sufficient liquid on the pan to avoid boiling off all of it), I bring the temperature down a bit to give me some time and then add some butter or dissolved starch to thicken (come to think of it, I may add the starch during the big boiling phase).

These technique works for me. However, we better let the pros in the group chime in.

-- ================================================Do you like wine? Do you live in South Florida? Visit the MIAMI WINE TASTERS group at

Another reason for the burning of the bits may be that I used

-- ================================================Do you like wine? Do you live in South Florida? Visit the MIAMI WINE TASTERS group at