Cooking with wine: get small bottles

I agree with Lisa about being a little choosey about wine you cook with. Beef burgundy just aint beef burgundy with chablis (IMHO). And bad wine will make your food taste like bad wine. And generally when you cook with wine the alcohol burns off and the flavor of the wine INTENSIFIES, so it had better be good-tasting to start with - but it needn't be expensive! I like to buy "splits" or even smaller for cooking - several wineries sell their wines in 4-packs of small, non-corked (screw top) bottles. But these are NOT cooking wines with salt - Betsy is so right, stay away from those! These small bottles are quite drinkable on their own. I just looked it up and they are 187 ML bottles which would be about 3/4 cup, or one-quarter of a regular wine bottle.

Funny story - last weekend friends dropped by late Sunday. My husband offered refreshments and they requested white wine. We were out - but he found my stash of "mini-bottles" of Chardonnay, and they never knew the difference.

Another tip I've heard but haven't tried is to freeze your unused wine. If you freeze it in the portions you would normally use for cooking, that would be very handy.

Salud!