I want to make a chukar cherry sauce recipe which calls for 1/2 cup of sweet red vermouth, which gets cooked and reduced with the cherries and other ingredients. I don't have vermouth on hand, and I'm reluctant to buy a bottle I may never use again given the number of other wines I have around.
So, my question is: what wine or combination of wines and other ingredients would be the best substitute for the flavor of sweet red vermouth in cooking, from the list below?
- Marsala wine
- Sherry
- White table wine (many varieties)
- Red table wine (many varieties)
- Sake
- Sweet white dessert wine
- Red and white wine vinegar
- Brandy
- Other pantry staples (sugar, lemons, etc.)
(I'm OK with the color being different, I really just care about the flavor)
Best Answer
I'd say sherry or marsala will have the closest flavor profile in terms of sweetness, with obviously some nuance of the herbal qualities of vermouth lost. But you could add some spices and herbs to make up for that (cloves, cinnamon, dried ginger, star anise, maybe bitter herbs like mugwort, which is easy to find where I am, or something like thyme or sage). See this article for a rough rundown of what might be in a typical vermouth.
That being said, fruit compotes are amenable to quite a lot of variations in alcohol. I sometimes used a white wine when making rote Grütze, a German style berry sauce/compote, but it's common to add a splash of something like cassis liqueur and fruit juice, but the one that went over the best I made with tart verjus. Brandy could work in moderation. If I went that direction, I'd use a fruit juice in roughly 90% the volume of vermouth intended and 10% in brandy.