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this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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Food and Cooking
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Isn't "cooking wine" just a word for the cheapest wine you can find in the store? Or the bottle of wine you just opened and don't like? So any place in the world with wine should do? But I'm afraid I don't have a good answer to sherry, I've just tried the non-alcoholic substitutes, apple/grape juice and a bit of vinegar. In doubt just try, but make it a small batch of food in case it tastes bad.
But I'm fairly sure we here in Germany don't have "cooking wine" printed on the labels either, and you're just supposed to buy a cheap bottle from the bottom shelf.
Cooking wine is indeed cheaper and lower quality. But more importantly it is shelf-stable. You can open a bottle of cooking wine and keep it in the cupboard. The stuff is labelled “cooking wine” in the US so that it is treated as such. It probably gets around some of the tight liquor controls there.
Europe does not seem to have a product with preservatives specifically for that purpose. So you would use substandard wines for cooking. If champaign goes flat because an open bottle sat out overnight, it’s still good for risotto. But I would still chill it if I weren’t making risotto the next day. In the case at hand, I don’t want to be keeping a bottle of sherry in the fridge.
When using a whole bottle in a day, then of course there is no issue. But it takes me a year to get through a bottle of Sherry.
Ah alright. I mean there is a cultural difference with how we balance convenience and things like additives in food... My local Aldi or Lidl has bottles with 200ml of wine. And I've seen people recommend freezing the wine into ice cubes. You'd just pick out one ice cube a time and throw it in the pan. I'm not really answering your question here, sorry, just in case you need some alternatives. I've also been annoyed by the wine bottle in the fridge taking up space for months, and I had regular wine sitting on the counter and seems it's okay for like >1-3 weeks. I think in the future I might go for the ice cubes, freeze the next leftover "cooking" wine and put them in a ziplock bag. But yeah, beverages with more alcohol or added preservatives should add to shelf-stability.
Ice cubes would be interesting for non-fortified wine. But I suppose sherry might not freeze at 15% alc. (not sure).
Anyway, someone just said only 12% alc is needed for shelf-stability and someone else said 15% is fine for the shelf, so that solves the problem. Sherry can simply be kept at room temp.