I don't cook with wine because I don't like the flavors myself and besides my SO is 25 years sober, but I sympathize with your wanting to master it.
Here is a video from a french chef Jean Pierre who is pretty easy going, but more importantly he doesn't just list ingredients and edit for aesthetics. He cooks the recipe in real time, but his vids aren't that long.
Try the Thyme & Port Wine Sauce recipe and you can pick up tips along the way.
I included the playlist in the link so you can look at the other sauce recipes if you find it useful.
Some things I learned are:
- Use a reduction pot (or even a skillet) as opposed to a straight sided pot to encourage convection to evaporate and reduce better
- Port, Madeira and Marsala don't require reduction, all others do
- Eliminate as much water from ingredients before introducing wine, for example mushrooms
- Patience
Things I forgot:
You can't change the acidity and you shouldn't try, instead marry the acidity to fat or sweetness. You create a new flavor that is more than the sum of the parts.
To balance acidity you need fat or sweet. Lemon & sugar or lemon & butter. Oil & vinegar.
Reducing wine first removes the alcohol but the conditions involved impact it: temperature, humidity, air circulation speed and surface area.
Using a wider pan increases surface area.
Running your overhead fan or open windows can help with surrounding airflow.
From TechieScientist:
Ethanol alcohols have a higher boiling point of around 78 degrees Celcius/ 173.1 Fahrenheit because of strong hydrogen bonding.
Humidity is probably not very changeable.
I heard the key is to not mix alcohol and fat cuz the fat is gonna "trap the alcohol and prevent it from evaporating", but then explain fondue to me motherfucker the fuck is a body without organs
I don't have any professional experience, I'm a very amateur cook, yet wine sauces dishes are always a success; so there must be something else at play here in your case, because you sound far more skilled than I am. My experience is wine works with slow cooking/low heat, it works with high heat, it works no matter what you put in the pot with the wine (onions, textured soy chunks, potatoes, vegetable oil, etc.), as long as you cook it for long enough - like at least 20 minutes. It smells strongly like wine everywhere at first, and then after about 10/15 mins it should start to smell delicious, and the alcohol is always gone after at most 20 minutes.
So I'm thinking the issue is the wine. I'm in France, so even the relatively basic wines I buy for this are relatively high quality; are you in the US ? try a more expensive wine maybe. An easy recipe to go for initially would be boeuf bourguignon for example (easily done vegan-style with soy proteins); and red wine recipes in general (white wine is harder because you do often have to manage the acidity; a common red bordeaux won't have this issue).
I'm an American who loves wine and I can tell you that even here buying low end imported wine from a good wine growing region is almost always a better bargain then buying domestic wine of the same price
I felt the above comment could be perceived as a bit smug initially but I still posted it because I honestly can't think of anything else; again, wine sauce dishes should be almost impossible to mess up with red wine. They're my go-to for easy tasty stuff to do. It's got to be the wine itself making a difference here.
Yeah, I just saw in the comments that the poster said they were using Franzia, which is a piss poor and piss cheap wine even by American standards, so yeah.... Easy to see why thier wine dishes suck XD
I don’t have any professional experience, I’m a very amateur cook, yet wine sauces dishes are always a success
same, cooking with wine is the easiest thing ever to me. Make the main thing, then butter thyme wine done. it's basically foolproof (no offense OP maybe your wine is really bad)
if you're cooking a soup, then the soup liquid obviously can't only be wine, that's way too sour. You need water/stock/coconut milk/etc as a filler liquid
Try chablis (pronounced chaaa bliss)
In my experience it's more mellow and slightly sweeter
you don't need an expensive wine, you just need something which is still sweet and not awful sour
I've just looked up what that is and it looks suspicious; out of curiosity and if you can find it: try a Bordeaux wine. Should come in a bottle looking like this - with a cork. Try a basic red wine sauce recipe with it. I suspect you'll find your result is far better.
You can almost certainly accomplish the same with a lot of US wines (a lot of Cali ones are excellent IIRC) but I know literally nothing about them so I can't recommend any.
are you finishing the sauce with butter or some other fat? that should help make it richer and cut some of the acidity
Cooking with wine? All I know is you drink wine while cooking your food(could be Ramen for all I care)
