Red wine

Red wine, as a cooking ingredient, means a dry red table wine — the fermented juice of dark-skinned grapes (Vitis vinifera) — reached for not to drink but to build flavour: to deglaze a pan, braise beef, poach a pear or reduce into a glossy sauce. It brings a bundle of things at once: dark fruit (cherry, plum, blackberry), a moderate wine acidity that reads as clean sourness, a drying tannic astringency that the palate registers as faint bitterness, a whisper of oak and spice, and a backbone of alcohol that carries aroma and, on the stove, mostly cooks away.