Cooking Wine: What It Is and Why Regular Wine Is Better

Cooking wine is wine with salt and preservatives added, sold near the vinegars and salad dressings at the supermarket. It keeps for a long time, but the salt goes into your food, and it isn’t meant to be drunk. If you have the choice, an inexpensive bottle of real dry wine usually does a better job. Cooking wine still has its uses when a recipe needs only a splash and you don’t keep wine in the house.

What’s in the bottle

Wine Spectator’s Dr. Vinny explains that cooking wine starts as wine made from grapes or grape concentrate. It has added salt and preservatives such as potassium sorbate and potassium metabisulfite, and it comes with an expiration date, usually about a year.

Taste of Home says the category covers dry and sweet reds and whites, fortified wines such as sherry, and rice wine, and that some bottles also contain a sweetener. It puts the alcohol at around 16 to 17 percent. In other words, “cooking” doesn’t mean low in alcohol. Check your label, since strength varies by bottle.

How US rules treat it

Two federal points explain why this product sits in the condiment aisle.

It is classed as wine “not for beverage use.” Under 27 CFR 24.215, salted wine must contain at least 1.5 grams of salt per 100 milliliters, which the rule also gives as 12.5 pounds of salt per 100 gallons. Containers removed tax-free as nonbeverage products must be marked to show they are not for sale or consumption as beverage wine. TTB, the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, describes nonbeverage wine as treated with materials such as salt that make it unfit for drinking.

Its labels follow food rules. TTB’s formula guidance says domestic salted cooking wine needs formula approval but doesn’t need a TTB Certificate of Label Approval, and that it must comply with the food labeling requirements of the US Food and Drug Administration. The same guidance says imported nonbeverage wine needs neither formula nor label approval. We didn’t find an FDA page written specifically about cooking wine, so we’ll leave the details at what TTB says.

How much salt that really is

The federal minimum works out to about 0.45 grams of salt in 2 tablespoons (30 milliliters) and more than 3.5 grams in a cup. Those are our calculations from the 1.5-gram rule, and individual bottles may hold more. For a real-world figure, MasterClass reports 180 milligrams of sodium in a 2-tablespoon serving of cooking sherry.

A splash in a big pot of stew won’t matter much. A cup reduced down to a sauce is another story, because the water evaporates and the salt stays. That’s why reductions are where we’d avoid it most.

Tip: If cooking wine is what you have, cut back the salt in the recipe and season at the end. Taste of Home gives the same advice.

Cooking wine vs regular wine

	Cooking wine	Regular dry wine
Added salt	Yes, at least 1.5 g per 100 ml when sold as salted wine	No
Where it’s sold	Near vinegars and dressings	Wine aisle or wine store
After opening	Months, per Taste of Home	A few days, per America’s Test Kitchen
Alcohol	Around 16–17%, per Taste of Home	Lower, says Taste of Home
Flavor in food	Can add a salty or metallic note, Dr. Vinny warns	Fruit flavors and acidity stay once the alcohol cooks down, per Dr. Vinny
Drinkable?	Not meant to be	Yes

Dr. Vinny’s overall rule is not to cook with a wine you wouldn’t drink. We think that’s a good rule for most home cooks, and it rules out nearly all salted bottles.

When cooking wine makes sense

Taste of Home makes the fair case for it: when a recipe needs a small amount, about ½ cup or less, and you have no table wine, cooking wine beats leaving wine out altogether. It also suits people who cook with wine only occasionally, because the additives extend an open bottle’s life from hours to months.

We’d keep it for those situations:

• a splash in a savory soup, stew or stir-fry where the salt is easy to adjust;
• a pantry backup, if you rarely open wine.

And we’d skip it for:

• Reductions and pan sauces, where the salt concentrates.
• Desserts, where salt is unwelcome. MasterClass makes the same point about cooking sherry.
• Dishes for someone avoiding alcohol. Cooking wine contains alcohol, and heat doesn’t remove all of it. USDA retention figures show a dish simmered and stirred for 30 minutes still keeps about 35% of its alcohol, and one simmered for 2.5 hours keeps about 5%.

What to use instead

Real dry wine. America’s Test Kitchen’s all-purpose advice is a medium-bodied, unoaked wine that isn’t too sweet, such as a crisp Sauvignon Blanc for white, or a blended American or Australian red or a Côtes du Rhône for red. Wine Enthusiast’s rule is that the wine doesn’t need to be special, as long as it’s a bottle you might drink. Our guides to the best white wine for cooking and the best red wine for cooking cover what to buy, and when you switch, season the dish a little more to make up for the missing salt.

Box wine. America’s Test Kitchen recommends it for cooks who use only a little at a time, since an opened bottle lasts only a few days.

Frozen wine. America’s Test Kitchen freezes leftover wine in 1-tablespoon portions in an ice cube tray and drops the cubes into sauces.

Dry vermouth. It has a shelf life of several months, according to America’s Test Kitchen, which makes it our favorite backup for recipes calling for white wine.

No alcohol at all. America’s Test Kitchen stirs ½ teaspoon of red or white wine vinegar or lemon juice into every ½ cup of broth just before serving. Our guides to a white wine substitute and a red wine substitute go through more options by dish.

Buying and labels

Read the front and back of the bottle. “Cooking wine” and “not for beverage use” are the signs you’re looking at a salted product, and the ingredient list should show salt. The same applies to bottles named after a wine style: cooking sherry and cooking Marsala are usually salted too, and so is Shaoxing rice wine labeled for cooking, as our Shaoxing wine guide explains. The Marsala you want for chicken Marsala is on the wine shelf.

Wine is for adults of legal drinking age (21 in the US). Cooking wine isn’t meant for drinking.