When cooking with wine, chefs usually recommend that you use whatever wine you're planning to drink. Good advice and I generally adhere to it. But the advice presumes you're going to be drinking wine and that might not be the case on a weeknight or you may be planning on red wine with a steak but you need white wine in the appetizer. You can always re-cork the wine, but once exposed to oxygen it's shelf life is limited - particularly in the case of white wine.
For some reason I seem to cook with white wine far more often than red and several years ago I hit upon a solution - if I'm not planning on drinking white wine I don't cook with it, instead I use dry vermouth.
Vermouth is a fortified wine (meaning additional alcohol is added to it) flavored with herbs and spices. The combination of a higher alcohol content - typically 17 to 18 percent - and the herbs and spices have the effect of extending vermouth's shelf life. An open bottle will easily keep for a couple of months in the refrigerator so there's no need to drink it quickly.
I've become fond of cooking with vermouth and like the herbal undertones in sauces. I even like an occasional glass of vermouth. Unfortunately red vermouth is usually sweetened and isn't a good substitute for a dry red wine, but the next time you have a recipe calling for white wine, try vermouth instead.
