Beef – Flambéing wine to cook off alcohol

There are several things that come together to produce the overall flavor profile of the dish, not all of them having anything to do with the wine. Traditional factors such as good spicing, blooming the spices, browning ingredients and so forth continue to have a huge affect.

Deglazing with some wine adds the following:

• Acidity. Wine is an acid food product, and this brightness can enhance the overall flavor of the dish.
• Sweetness. Wine can also be sweet, which acts as a flavor enhancer.
• Fruitiness. The fruity qualities of the wine may compliment the other flavors of the dish.
• Alcohol. The alcohol in the wine will not completely evaporate. Some will remain, helping to dissolve and make volatile some flavor components which are ot soluble in either water or fats (this is especially true in tomato based dishes). This can give foods cooked with alcohol an extra depth of flavor.

The first and last of these affects probably have the most profound affect on your dish.

Adding the wine in dribs and drabs probably doesn't help, but in the end you need to use enough wine to have a good effect on your dish. Even though it will be reduced, it is still an ingredient, and you need to have enough to matter.

I do suggest adding it all at once, and letting it boil away; this should work quite well.

The quality of wine you use also matters. You want a wine that tastes decent, even as a beverage. My personal preference for cooking is a Chardonnay, but I don't think that preference is universal.

The extended reduction could be destroying or driving off some of the volatile, organic compounds that give the wine its flavor. Wine can contain literally thousands of aromatic and flavorful chemicals from the specific variety of grape and the winemaking process (see http://www.winegeeks.com/articles/93 for a good article that balances geeky and approachable) and together their flavor is what makes up the "profile" of the wine's flavor. As you reduce, some of the more temperature-sensitive ones are being driven off, just like how the alcohol in the wine burns off before the water does. So it's probably the over-reduction that's culpable here, but some flavor loss/change is inevitable with any reduction.

The other factor is dilution. Adding or removing water from a substance can change the aromatics that your nose picks up as you eat or drink. Try this: take two glasses of the same wine, chill one in the fridge, and add ice to the other until it reaches about the same temperature. You'll very likely notice some significant differences in their flavor.

The best solution is to watch your reduction carefully so that it doesn't over-reduce in the first place. If you want a stronger flavor, you're better off varying the type of wine that you're using. Fruit-forward wines like Merlot tend to retain their flavor pretty well in reductions.