When used for cooking, wines exhibit various effects such as effect of masking unpleasant smells of meats and fish, effect of improving aroma and effect of softening the texture of meat and therefore have been widely used for cooking as well as for drinking.
Heretofore, when they are used for cooking it has been mostly the case that wines are added to food materials and cooked together or they are heated in a pan and condensed before use. For example, wines are used as a dipping sauce for dipping food materials in order to make food tasty, or as a broth for boiling or steaming fishes, shellfishes or meats. Also, wines are used for preparing various sauces and well cooked jelly.
In banquets held in, for example, hotels or restaurants, it is often necessary to prepare and serve a dish in large amounts at a time and when wine is to be used in a condensed state, it is necessary to boil a large amount of wine in a pan to concentrate it on previous night or well before setting the table, which is inconvenient to cooks in many respects. For example, it takes much time and the smell of the wine scatters around and hangs over in the cuisine.
Further, conventional concentration by heating in a pan of red and white wines results in browning and as a result it has been impossible to obtain condensed wine of a high quality which has a good color tone and meets purpose for which it is used. To date, it has been impossible to get condensed wines for cooking and therefore there is a demand for condensed wine for cooking having a high quality.
Among related arts, there have heretofore been proposed various improvements in the method of utilizing condensed grape juice as a raw material for wines. For example, there have been proposed a method of improving the quality of grape juice to be used for the production of wine in which acid contents are removed by reverse osmosis using a membrane (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 129797/1975); a method of removing unpleasant smell of wine prepared from heated condensed grape juice (mastic) in which condensed grape juice is fermented after it is diluted with water and purified using a combination of an ion exchange membrane and electrodialysis (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 77884/1980); a method of freezing condensation in which freezing condensation is performed after adding an alcohol to fruit juice in an amount of 0.5 to 2.4 g per 100 ml of juice (Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 141188/1980); and the like. However, these methods all relate to condensation of raw material juice for preparing wines for drinking before fermentation but are not a technique of condensation of wines for cooking.
That is, as far as is known, there has heretofore been no idea of providing condensed wine, for cooking having a good quality and a high concentration by condensation.