What Wine Should You Cook With?

Finally, a Wine Column That Will Save You Money

In the early 2000s, I was having lunch at Mario Batali’s pizza restaurant in New York, Otto, when I saw him pinch a waitress’s ass. I tried to make sense of this. Were they dating? That seemed inappropriate because he owned the place. Had she just pinched his ass and he was retaliating? That seemed unlikely since they were both over seven years old.

The second time I thought, “Mario Batali is a bad man,” was in March 2006. I had never braised anything before and asked a friend for a recipe for short ribs. It’s a Mario Batali recipe called Beef in Barolo. And it calls for one and a half cups of Barolo, an Italian wine that, along with Amarone, is the most expensive in Italy. Here’s what I’ve learned to pair Barolo with: Nothing. Just drink it alone, before dinner. And I don’t like drinking wine alone.

I was being asked to spend $100 on a bottle and boil half of it into a pot full of celery, onions, carrots, and canned tomatoes. I was getting my ass pinched.

I called some cooks I knew and they told me that, hell no, I shouldn’t pour a Barolo into a pot. But they all gave me a basic cooking rule: Don’t cook with wine you wouldn’t drink.

This left a lot of leeway.

Unfortunately, Julia Child had been more specific.

“If you do not have a good wine to use, it is far better to omit it, for a poor one can spoil a simple dish and utterly debase a noble one.”

Julia Child was no ass pincher. She was not only a great chef and teacher but also had traced her hand and drawn a turkey on it for an annual Thanksgiving feature I ran in Time magazine. It hangs in my house, alongside ones by Peter Max, Beck, Heidi Klum, and Monica Lewinsky.

Still, I did not want to do this. So I contacted a few chefs. And learned that Batali used a cheap California merlot in the “Beef in Barolo” he served at Babbo. The dish was probably created a century ago, when beef was expensive and Barolo was cheap.

I bought a bottle of Charles Shaw at Trader Joe’s for $2.

You know how only dimwits ask for top shelf liquor in their sweetened cocktails? That’s a genius move compared to boiling expensive wine.

Two years ago, I spent two days staging in the kitchen of Chez Maggy in Denver with Ludo Lefebvre for Town & Country magazine.

I was amazed at how much good food a great restaurant can waste. Chunks of duck sliced off to create the perfect shape. So much of the onion.

But there was one item they did not waste. Good wine. When I went into the storage closet, I saw shelves of Almaden boxed wine. It goes for about $15 for five liters, or about $2.25 a bottle.

Not only does cooking with Almaden save money and show respect for the producers of craft wines such as Barolo, but it also tastes better in food. You want the fruit, not the tannins. A little extra sugar or acid is fine in a dish. If you want cooked, bitter tannins, skip the Barolo and use black tea.

I cook with either Charles Shaw or the Three Wishes brand from Whole Foods ($4). Oftentimes, it’s the leftover bottle in the back of the fridge that I used for a dish a week earlier. And, yes, I would drink them both.

When The New York Times called a pre-#MeToo’d Batali about the Barolo, he said:

“The resulting comparison of the raw, uncooked wine and the muted, deeper and reduced flavor of the wine in the finished dish ... allows more of the entire spectrum of specific grape flavor, a dance on the ballroom of the diner’s palate.”

Eleven years after I made my Beef in Charles Shaw, his career ended after many accusations of sexual misconduct. He has never been held accountable for putting Barolo in his recipe.

I’d like to go to his new bakery in Michigan and pinch his ass.