Does The 'Drinkable Wine Only' Rule Have An Exception In Baking?

When it comes to baking ingredients, we often want to use ones that give us the lowest price without sacrificing the recipe's flavor in the process. This is one of the reasons why the debate between cooking wine and drinking wine is so prevalent, as many chefs believe you should never cook with a wine you wouldn't want to drink. Well, when it comes to baking, the same line of thought is held. Many bakers stand firmly against using cooking wine (or a cheap bottle of drinking wine) over proper bottles of wine. The fact that drinking wine is needed for both standard cooking and baking was reinforced by Annie Edgerton, a 30-year veteran of the wine and spirits industry, an educator at Flatiron Wines & Spirits, and the CEO of Edgerton Wine & Spirit Appraisals. 

"Only cook with wine you'd drink simply because it is also an ingredient in the recipe," Edgerton told The Takeout. "In many dishes, the wine's alcohol will burn off, leaving trace structural elements (natural acids, residual sugar if a sweet wine, a hint of tannin from a red), and remaining flavors. So, if those flavors aren't great, you're asking for trouble."

Using a cheap bottle of wine to bake with is a bad choice due to how prevalent the flavors of the wine are in the final product. "Ingredients with a lot of presence, like sugar and fat, may balance some elements of an iffy wine fairly well," Edgerton admitted. "But there's a reason recipes call for small amounts of intense ingredients like wine ... a little goes a long way." Thus, regardless of how large or small a role you think wine plays in your recipe, always be prepared for its quality to impact the dish in some way and proceed accordingly.

While this way of thinking does call into question leftover wine (which we'd rather not drink but which can be used for braising) the consensus is that you're better off not risking a ruined dish. Much better to simply use good wine for baking. "Even if you're baking a very sweet, very fatty cake, would you want to gamble that using an unpleasant wine would still work out? I wouldn't."