The Best Red Wine Varieties To Keep In Your Kitchen For Beginner Home Cooks

Red wine may be first and foremost for drinking, but it's also a flavorful tool for cooking. We interviewed Dan Pelosi, author of cookbooks "Let's Eat" and "Let's Party," and Erin Henderson, founder of The Wine Sisters wine events company, to guide us through the best red wine varieties to cook with.

"Look for red wines that have lower tannin and brighter acidity," Henderson advises. "Wine is used in cooking for flavor. But it's big advantage is natural acidity which tenderizes foods and keeps them moist." That alcoholic bite cooks off but, says Henderson, it "helps the flavor molecules of the other ingredients open up." Wine delivers an underlying richness to a red pasta sauce, for example, while also enhancing the flavors of the tomatoes, herbs, and aromatics. "Alcohol also helps break down fats," Henderson adds, "which is also why it's often a main ingredient in marinades for tough meats." The best cuts of steak for marinating in red wine include flank and skirt steaks as well as tri-tip and sirloin filets. Henderson recommends "zinfandel, Gamay, and basic Chianti" as excellent cooking wines.

Bottles of wine run the gamut of prices, so which should you use for cooking? "Drink the good stuff and cook with the rest!" Pelosi says. "The flavor of wine evolves so much when it's mixed with other ingredients that often you don't need expensive wine to get the flavor you are looking for!" 

Despite many cooks and blogs that recommend using drinking wine and cooking wine interchangeably, it doesn't mean the wine has to be top tier. "Look, you don't want something that is actively bad — wine that corked, cooked, or maderized, and I think the adage of 'if you wouldn't drink it, don't cook with it' holds merit," Henderson says, "but you're not trying to preserve the flavor of your chardonnay or whatever in the final dish." Wine is more of a flavor enhancer than the primary flavoring agent, unless you're making a red wine reduction sauce. But, even then, wine is mixed with other savory ingredients from the meat marinade.

Boxed wine is an affordable option that we've included it on our list of the 13 best red wines for cooking. And Henderson confirms boxed wines' place in the kitchen. "I've worked in some pretty swanky restaurants, and I can tell you that the back shelves were lined with gallons of boxed wine for the chefs' to cook the $50 entrees with." We've even consulted an expert to choose the best quality boxed wine. You can also take a waste-not-want-not approach to that half a glass of leftover wine you didn't finish the other night by repurposing it into your next sauce or marinade. Henderson recounted from her time working in restaurants that "open bottles of wine went from the bar to the kitchen for cooking (as long as they weren't too far gone)."