This is shameful heresy, but I have a box of pretty high quality white wine in the cabinet near my stove, I keep a clean shot glass next to it, and whenever a recipe calls for something wine-shaped I basically just use that.

Sake? BOX WHITE. Shaoxing wine? BOX WHITE. Vermouth? BOX WHITE. Deglazing a pan? You better believe it’s BOX WHITE.

Sherry? Nah, I’m using BOX WHITE.

Thing is, keeping a bunch of trash-tier half-open liquor to go off in your cabinet is not going to make good food. That bottle of sake you opened six months ago to make teriyaki one time? That’s no good. You should throw it out.

Box wine, on the other hand - unlike bottled wine - stays fresh for months after being opened.

The obvious alternative strategy is that every time dinner calls for a shot of sake or vermouth or sherry, you should open and finish a nice, high quality bottle in the next two days, but I just am not in a place in my life where I can drink that aggressively.

I do the same with box red, which I use for stews and braises.

If I have any left at the end of the year, I’ll often take the dregs and use them to make hot, sweet, heavily spiced mulled wine.

okay but actually what the hell am I, a person who doesn’t like going outside, supposed to do in Canada on vacation

this whole country is boring as shit, it’s like if someone were to take 26 Montanas, line them up one after the other and freeze the whole thing half of the year

there’s Montreal I guess

everybody’s like “such natural beauty, so many mountains, wild and untamed outdoors, pacific northwest, snow sports” but I’m allergic to literally every part of that

my face will get puffy and I will get a nosebleed, that is enough majesty of the outdoors for me thank you

for the love of god, give me a walking food tour in a major metropolitan where there’s nothing but concrete, or an open-sourcy tech conference

wine touring in the Okanagan is pretty nice but honestly after about three tastings I can’t differentiate one wine from another at all any more

also the horrible growing conditions and constant fires of the past few years have left the wineries grimmer and sadder than ever before, they’re either barely willing to run tastings or they’ve turned tastings into an expensive activity

as a practical consideration, you also need someone to drive you from tasting to tasting OR you need to really, really pace yourself

This may not seem so classy, but actually an older red wine probably has a bunch of nasty sediment and old cork floating around in it and a quick pass through a coffee filter clears that right up.

Some of my family members have a touch of the wine snob about them, so I always decant nice red wine when I serve it to them - although the $2 plastic sterilite jug fails to impress

apparently this is called a “waiter’s friend”, or “wine key”, although all of this time I’ve been calling it a “french army knife”

The term “wine key” came into existence due to the German inventor’s last name, Wienke, which is difficult for English speakers to pronounce. When ordering the product from catalogs, the meaning and origins of the new Wienke Corkscrew gradually became lost and it was simply referred to as a “Winekey” or wine key. Patent number 283,731, August 21, 1883, simply refers to it as “C.F.A. WIENKE LEVER CORKSCREW.”