Wine pie: too good to be true

Have you seen the latest viral food video of wine pie? Content creator @itsmejuliette garnered over 8 million views with her recent video in which she mixes an entire bottle of wine with store cupboard ingredients in a prepared pie crust. She pulls it out of the oven and it appears to be set into a jelly-like state. The final clip shows her holding a forkful up to her mouth, but we never see her actually eat it. That’s probably because wine pie doesn’t taste good, according to baking experts who have tried it.

This video isn’t alone in its claim that you can make a delicious pie with nothing but wine, sugar, and thickeners like cornstarch or flour. However, most of them seem farfetched: one even claims you can bake the pie in only 7 minutes. The viral video itself is strange because it shows the wine being poured into the pie crust, then some sugar, flour, and what appears to be cornstarch are piled on top, with some feeble whisking to mix it all together. There appear to be lumps of flour throughout the mixture before the video cuts away to the creator dousing the top with gobs of cinnamon – which doesn’t get mixed in at all. As one commenter asked, “Did you know you can mix things in a bowl before you put them in a pie crust?” That, of course, is the real reason for videos like these. It’s all about the clicks, which is why you see videos of people serving spaghetti on a countertop or mixing ungodly ingredients together in a slow cooker among other food atrocities. There’s a reason the video stopped before she actually ate the pie.

Just in case wine pie was something that is real and delicious, I searched the EYB Library for a recipe. I found one that seemed like it was similar to these videos, Wine pie from 2020’s Preserving, Potting and Pickling by Elisabeth Luard (that book appears to be a reprint of The Barricaded Larder which came out in 1988). However, the recipe isn’t online so I wasn’t able to see what it entailed. There are many good pie recipes that have wine as an ingredient like the one pictured above, so that’s the direction I would go. If you want to have wine as dessert, there are many delicious sorbets and other frozen desserts made with wine.