Sort of. You distil the wine, ethanol comes out first in a higher concentration than water, you also get some bits of the wine flavour, but some is left behind as well. Over time the ABV of the liquid coming out of the still drops as the ethanol is mostly boiled off. Mostly. There would probably still be traces of it left down to the last few drops if you were to evaporate all of it.
Fun fact though when chefs add wine and say “it just boils off”, this is mostly a lie. Depending on how you are cooking it some amount will remain. A long stew probably removes most but something quick would still contain a lot of the alcohol. But it’s a very small amount in total.
It’s not untrue that it boils off, but dilution is the bigger factor by a wide margin. When I use wine to deglaze, it will be 100ml. That is then turned into 2 or 3 liters of sauce, so a dilution of 1:20, 1:30. Or, expressed in percentages, 3-5% of the sauce would be wine if none of it evaporated - 14% alcohol would be reduced to less than 0.5% just by dilution.
To get a similar reduction from evaporation, you’d need to boil off 95% of the alcohol, assuming none of the water is also evaporated, which it will at the temperature of deglazing. I don’t know the exact ratios here, but even a 75% net alcohol evaporation (which I think is generous) would leave you with a 3.5% alcohol (light beer) before dilution.
Edit: the table he shows has 95% actual alcohol loss for a 2.5 hours simmer, but every other method (where you’d “burn it off”) is below 25%, so that’s definitely a noticeble amount of alcohol left in, especially when you start with something like a brandy.
Can Jesus turn the water in wine into wine?
Jesus invented brandy.
Wait, is that what brandy is?
Sort of. You distil the wine, ethanol comes out first in a higher concentration than water, you also get some bits of the wine flavour, but some is left behind as well. Over time the ABV of the liquid coming out of the still drops as the ethanol is mostly boiled off. Mostly. There would probably still be traces of it left down to the last few drops if you were to evaporate all of it.
Fun fact though when chefs add wine and say “it just boils off”, this is mostly a lie. Depending on how you are cooking it some amount will remain. A long stew probably removes most but something quick would still contain a lot of the alcohol. But it’s a very small amount in total.
It’s not untrue that it boils off, but dilution is the bigger factor by a wide margin. When I use wine to deglaze, it will be 100ml. That is then turned into 2 or 3 liters of sauce, so a dilution of 1:20, 1:30. Or, expressed in percentages, 3-5% of the sauce would be wine if none of it evaporated - 14% alcohol would be reduced to less than 0.5% just by dilution.
To get a similar reduction from evaporation, you’d need to boil off 95% of the alcohol, assuming none of the water is also evaporated, which it will at the temperature of deglazing. I don’t know the exact ratios here, but even a 75% net alcohol evaporation (which I think is generous) would leave you with a 3.5% alcohol (light beer) before dilution.
Relevant Adam Ragusea video.
Edit: the table he shows has 95% actual alcohol loss for a 2.5 hours simmer, but every other method (where you’d “burn it off”) is below 25%, so that’s definitely a noticeble amount of alcohol left in, especially when you start with something like a brandy.