An important lesson from the age of food-and-wine enlightenment is that when a recipe called for wine, it does not mean the stuff they sell in supermarkets as “cooking wine.” Nor does it mean some half-consumed bottle that’s been in your fridge (or worse in your cabinet over the stove) for a year. Wine tastes so delicious as an ingredient because it started out delicious. As an analogy, you wouldn’t use rotten tomatoes in a home-made pasta sauce, would you? And unless you had some dietary restriction, you wouldn’t use skim milk instead of whole cream to make a creamy poppy-seed salad dressing. So don’t use denatured wine in your reduction.

But then the conventional wisdom took a big swing in the other direction. The axiom became: cooks should use only the wine that they’ll be serving with the meal once it’s finished. This silly rule led to a lot of abuses, like would-be French maîtres de cuisine throwing grand cru Burgundy into their coq au vin. The only good place for a $100 bottle of wine is in a glass, in your hand, on its way to your mouth.

For my rule of oven-mitted thumb on cooking with wine, click here:

Cook with a wine you’d enjoy if it were in your glass, but don’t cook with a wine you’d rather drink. That may seem like a fine distinction, but it’s not. My go-to cooking red, which I can still get on sale for less than $10, is an Italian sangiovese-merlot blend from Falesco called “Vitiano Rosso.” It’s enjoyable enough to drink casually, but no tears are shed when it is assigned to the salsa puttanesca. For whites, I look for anything from the south of France (a Côtes du Rhône, Costières de Nîmes) for less than $8. The grapes in the blend (which tend to be roussane, ugni blanc, rolle viognier, or any number of other under-the-radar players) will be just what you need: flavorful, not flabby, and cheap.

One final tip: although it’s not necessary to cook with the wine you’re going to pour at the table, it is fun to cook with a wine that comes from the region to which your dish is native.