Substitute Suggestions for Wine in Cooking

Fruit juice and vinegars go a long way towards emulating spirits in many dishes. juice and sherry vinegar with a dollup of honey make a decent swap for marsala. Apple juice diluted with 1/4 water with a squirt of lemon juice substitutes well for chardonnays, chablis, and some other medium bodied whites. Red grapejuice (Not concord), which shows up on grocers shelves from time to time with a splash of red wine vinegar is almost indiscernable from that quarter bottle of cabernet I have sitting next to my stove from the meal from last week. Asian substitutes are quite easy, too- Mirin, though it is made directly from rice wine, is extremely low in alcohol (I've never gotten it to flame). Rice wine vinegar combined with a dollup of honey to cut the acid works well in many sauce and marinades. As for the coq au vin, I suspect unless you're going for a three day marination and a half hour braise, enough of the alcohol will have simmered away over the 2 hour cooking period. Trifle and other brandy/liquer soaked desserts is a bit of a puzzler- sure, you can soak lady fingers in double strength coffee with too much sugar, but the alcoholic "perfumes" are pretty hard to mimic. Good luck! I've used Perrier before! It works great for a white wine substitute, anything where a lemony background is fine. I used it for the first time when I was making sauteed mushrooms and realized that I didn't have any white wine at the last minute- subbed the Perrier and my husband said he liked it better that way! Necessity is the mother of all inventions! I think it works well because it has a little zip to it and is bubbly, so it deglazes well.