Cookbook:Wine
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Cookbook | Recipes | Ingredients | Equipment | Techniques | Cookbook Disambiguation Pages | Ingredients | Alcoholic Drink
Wine is an alcoholic drink commonly used to add flavor in cooking. Many types of cooking will evaporate the alcohol, leaving a nearly non-alcoholic dish. For uncooked usage of wine, see the numerous warnings on the alcoholic drink page.
Characteristics
[edit | edit source]Wine usually has an alcohol content of between 10 and 15 percent, and is made by fermentation of grape juice. Fruit wines are wine-like beverages made from fruits other than grapes. Fortified wine such as port and sherry is made by adding brandy to wine, increasing the strength to around 20 percent.
Basic types of wine
[edit | edit source]- sake, a rice wine used in Japanese cooking
- red wine, a wine made from red or purple grapes and fermented with the skins
- white wine, a wine made from green or yellow grapes, fermented without the skins
- rose or pink wine, a wine made from grapes, following neither the red nor white procedure
- hard cider, a wine made from apple juice
Fortified wines are wines to which additional alcohol, usually brandy, has been added.
The original reason for fortifying wine was to preserve it. Alcohol is a natural preservative, and when added before the fermentation of wine is complete, it kills the yeast and leaves residual sugar behind as well as preventing contamination by spoilage organisms. The end result is a wine that is both sweeter and stronger, normally containing about 20% alcohol by volume (ABV). When the perfection of bottling methods made fortification no longer necessary, fortification nevertheless continued because wine drinkers had acquired a liking for this kind of wine.
Fortified wines include: