Why cook with good wines? The whole question about using fine wine in cooking, and about fine wine at all, is really not just a snob thing. I think most people will agree that the quality of the ingredients in a dish correlates very strongly to the quality of the finished product; the other critical factor being how those ingredients are handled to maximize their potential. Good wine does require some pretty careful handling, but the end result definitely shows through in a dish if it's done right.

While you often do get what you pay for in wine, high price alone does not always mean great flavor, or suitability for cooking. Shop around for good bargains in simple, well balanced, young and powerful wines that will stand up to being simmered down in a sauce or splashed in a dish to add flavor.

My favorite simple cooking wine standby is Parducci. Their wines are inexpensive but do have all the basics you want—good fruit, enough tannin and texture to balance out, and a fair amount of structure. Nothing truly great or magnificent, but enjoyable to drink with simple and hearty food and fine to cook with for simple dishes. Parducci in the bolognese sauce and a glass of it with the spaghetti is a wonderful, classic Italian dinner for not very much money at all.

Can I ever use the cheap stuff?

A lot depends on what you're cooking. If you are making a spaghetti sauce, go ahead and dump in that inexpensive, tannic, juicy and assertive red. It does not matter much; the intense tomato flavors will wreck the more delicate aromas and all of the structure of a really good red wine anyways. Don't even bother adding a white wine, or a wimpy red; the tomatoes will just swallow the wine right up and never give it back.

Just keep in mind that if the wine tastes actually bad, ie, it has significant flaws that make it unpleasant to drink, those flaws are going to carry right through into whatever you cook with it. So make that "inexpensive wine" and not "cheap wine", please. Thunderbird is Right Out. Don't even think about Boone Hill.

Great wine leftovers are good for cooking!

Since my taste buds outvote my actual capacity to absorb alcohol, every time I open a bottle of something fine and I don't have several friends over to share, some really good wine often ends up leftovers. A fine way to use such leftovers is to cook with it in a way that actually showcases the quality of the original wine.

If you buy a good bottle to match the meal, open the bottle a few hours early and use ½ to 1 cup in cooking, then put it under nitrogen gas or let it breathe till dinner, your cooking expenditure is completely justified.

Cooking does accelerate (and change) the developing process of a wine, so you can use it directly from the undecanted bottle. You can also use "dregs" and sediment in a sauce, if the taste is strong but not objectionable.

Sheee-it, would you really cook with a bottle of the expensive stuff?

Believe it. If you are a skilled cook, you really can create an end product that actually tastes like it contains a glass—or a bottle—of Mouton or d'Yquem.

I have added rare and delicious white wines to fine homemade poultry or rabbit sausages; the freshness and the acidity of the wines really does come through, along with their richness and complexity. A great Sauternes can be used to cream the finest sweet, fresh blue cheese you can find, and if you layer the results between crumbly slices of warm black walnut pastry and serve it with fresh, crisp apples and cracked black pepper, you will find that you did not pour your d'Yquem in vain. More than one grand cru Bordeaux in my house has found its last glass or two tipped into the saucepot along with black truffles and demiglace to achieve an end result that still sings with the subtle and complex character of the wine.

It really possible to turn a fine wine into an almost equally fine sauce.  By very slowly reducing the wine at 180 degrees uncovered to 1/4 or less of its original volume, to preserve some reasonable part of its flavor intact. The key is "very slowly", and of course, "some reasonable".  Some more delicate wines will not survive any mistreatment at all, let alone simmering.

Choose wines with plenty of youth and power if you plan a reduction—a fragile old wine will simply fall apart and die, sighing and whispering notes of its former glory as you murder it in the pan.