Cooking wine or cooking sherry refers to inexpensive grape wine or rice wine (in Chinese and other East Asian cuisine). It is intended for use as an ingredient in food rather than as a beverage.

Cooking wine typically available in North America is treated with salt as a preservative and food coloring. ^[1] When a wine bottle is opened and the wine is exposed to oxygen, a fermentation process will gradually transform the alcohol into acetic acid, resulting in wine vinegar. The salt in cooking wine inhibits the growth of the acetic acid-producing microorganisms. This preservation is important because a bottle of cooking wine may be opened and used occasionally over a long period of time.

Cooking wines are convenient for cooks who use wine as an ingredient for cooking only rarely. However, they are not widely used by professional chefs, as they believe the added preservative significantly lowers the quality of the wine, and hence the food made with that wine. Most professional chefs prefer to use inexpensive but drinkable wine for cooking, and this recommendation is given in many professional cooking textbooks as well as in general cookbooks. Many chefs believe there is no excuse for using a low quality cooking wine for cooking when there are quality drinkable wines available at very low prices.

Nevertheless, the sale of cooking wine persists, both as a tradition and because in some areas (such as New York State), cooking wines are manufactured with a low alcohol content (< 5%) and can be sold in grocery stores, whereas ordinary wines with higher alcohol content (> 5%) can only be sold in liquor stores. In many jurisdictions, cooking wine is not considered a beverage, and thus may be sold to minors despite containing alcohol.

Furthermore, in North America, it is difficult to acquire the numerous kinds of Chinese wine that can be used to cook effectively. However, Chinese cooking wines typically have very high alcohol contents, ranging from 16% to the triple distilled liquor (Baijiu) with alcohol content of 55%. Due to this, in Vancouver BC, Chinese cooking wine is required to contain at least 5% salt content. Still, homeless people in the DTES neighbourhood of Vancouver may still purchase them from numerous Chinese grocery stores and mix them with Coca Cola^{[citation needed]}, as not only are they easily accessible, they are also cheaper than traditional Chinese wine.

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