I started out on Burgundy…

How good should your cooking wine be? What I’ve learned from making coq au vin and boeuf bourguignon over the years.

It’s become something of a tradition in our family to make a rich stew on New Year’s Eve - we very rarely go out - open a bottle of unusually good wine and then watch The Third Man. We might cook a boeuf bourguignon or a daube de boeuf (both recipes from Elizabeth David) though one memorable year I attempted to make a proper coq au vin as outlined by Jeffrey Steingarten in It Must Have Been Something I Ate. You can read the full recipe here. It’s quite involved. 

The first step involves finding an actual cock, what Americans would call a rooster, which I eventually tracked down in a halal butcher in Deptford. It would be an understatement to say it smelt a little gamey. Steingarten’s recipe takes days as you have to make a stock from the body and the breast meat, which is much too stringy to eat, and then slowly poach the rest of the bird in wine and the stock. It did taste good but the next day we both felt decidedly peculiar, as if we’d ingested some sort of hallucinogenic mushroom. We ended up discarding the leftovers.

I definitely remember that coq but I don’t remember the wine I used. With a bird that powerful, I’m not sure it matters that much. The experts seem divided on this. Watching the Burgundy episode of Floyd on France, he uses a Gevrey-Chambertin to make his coq au vin. In contrast, I seem to recall Anthony Bourdain using cheap jug wine to make boeuf bourguignon in his restaurant Les Halles in an early TV appearance which I can’t find now (update, here it is). It may have even been Algerian. I must have made dozens of boeuf bourguignons. In the early days, I’d use a cheap Burgundy or at least a nice pinot noir but quickly discovered that the quality of the wine seemed to make very little difference. One year I even made it with a South African Pinotage! The quality of the meat, however, is a different matter. I’ve tried using cheap supermarket stewing steak and it never achieves that melty unctuousness. 

Perhaps my palate isn’t refined enough but I’m not convinced that after four hours of cookery even Jancis herself could spot whether you used a half-decent bottle of Beaune or a supermarket Cotes-du-Rhone, the only thing I would avoid is anything anaemic, sweet or oaky. People always say never cook with a wine that you wouldn’t drink but I’m happy to use a half oxidised bottle of white when making pasta sauces etc. That’s not to say that the type of wine never matters, For chicken in riesling for example, I will use riesling, and dishes that call for sherry, need sherry. My rule of thumb is the less you are cooking the wine, the better it needs to be. 

My version looked a lot like this

This New Year’s Eve there was only one cookbook we could cook from and that was Russell Norman’s Brutto which my wife received for Christmas. It’s a hymn to the hearty joys of Florentine food and as with all Russell’s books, it’s a joy to read, to hold and to look at. It’s also very much up my street with lots of meaty recipes that don’t seem to require any skill just good ingredients. This year I decided to make the beef shin and peppercorn stew. Russell specifies that it has to be beef shin - no other cut will do.

The recipe calls for a bottle of Chianti or Sanviogese, not ‘merlot bought from the petrol station’. The only Italian wine I had in the cupboard was Barbaresco, I’m not cooking with that, so it was off to the supermarket. Remembering my previous experience with stews I gave the Chianti a swerve in favour of Tesco’s Finest Montepulciano d’Abruzzo (only £6.50 with a Clubcard). I had a glass while cooking out of a Duralex tumbler stolen from Polpo, Russell’s old restaurant, in a fit of over exuberance a few year’s back. It’s really very nice: ripe, a little bittersweet, just the sort of thing you’d enjoy drinking by the carafe in a trattoria. It almost seemed a shame to cook with it.

But into the pot it went. After four hours very slow cooking, I turned it off and left it overnight. In the morning the meat was sitting in a rich winey jelly. I could see why he said it had to be beef shin, the gelatin thickens the dish. That night we opened a bottle of Barbaresco (Prodduturi 2016 in case you were interested), warmed up the stew which was thick and rich with the peppercorn making it aromatic but not really spicy. I can’t imagine how it could have been better even if we’d used a good Chianti instead. We savoured the meat, and the heady wine, and raised a glass to absent friends.