Everyone has heard the adage, “never cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink”. The logic is that you shouldn’t add poor quality ingredients into your food because the flavors of that wine will affect the flavor of your meal.
So…if the flavor of your wine matters, then the flavor of your wine *matters*, right? Pinot Noir tastes very different from Cabernet, which tastes very different from Merlot. And when you cook with wine, the water and alcohol evaporate, concentrating these differences and making them more pronounced. Even if you knew the varietal you like, the problem isn’t solved. Take Chardonnay, for example. It can be oaky, or buttery, or green apple-like, or acidic. And each of these Chardonnay “types” will have a different flavor in your meal.
You can’t simply cook with a generic “dry red wine” or “dry white wine” for your meal (or rather, you probably shouldn’t) any more than you can add “spice” to your recipe. As with any ingredient, you want consistency and appropriateness of flavor.
ACADÉMIE wines are authentic dry wines perfectly blended and balanced for your cooking. We source wines from Napa, Lodi & Sonoma and blend them according to profiles we’ve developed with chefs. Each wine is unique and distinct, and does very targeted things in your everyday gourmet cooking.
Don’t forget to taste our wines before you cook with them (Buyer beware: they are very tasty. Try not to drink the whole bottle). Think about the flavors they will impart to your cooking.
Because after all, if flavor matters, then flavor matters, right?
We’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth mentioning again: In the age of XYZ Corp’s Plastic Bottle Sauce (with loads of sodium), it’s easy to forget that you don’t have to be a master chef to create a sauce that is healthy and *very* fast to make (around 5-10 minutes).
Generally, the qualities of your individual dishes will have a predominant taste and will fall into one of the five main taste categories: sour, salty, bitter, sweet, and umami. You may find that some ingredients have qualities from more than one category (mustard, for instance, can be sour and salty). Occasionally you can find a synergy between two categories that you wouldn’t think might go together (a great example is salted taffy).
