Ask 10 cooks what they do with leftover wine and, trust me, at least half will respond, “What’s leftover wine?” Hilarious.

Of course, these jokesters are mostly members of couples, and they have no problem polishing off a bottle of pinot over dinner; it’s just a little more than two 6-ounce glasses apiece.

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Consider adding white wine to littleneck clams.

A solo diner faces a higher bar. I’ve ended up drinking the equivalent of a bottle of wine over the course of a night with friends, but at home I’m usually a glass-and-a-half kind of guy. That means it takes me at least a few days to make it through a bottle, longer if I have restaurant meals on the agenda. (Sure, I could seek out those half-bottles, but they’re too limited in availability and variety.)

Like others, I use a vacuum-saving system to buy me a little more time in the refrigerator. But it merely postpones the inevitable, leaving me with a choice: Drink, dump or cook? Those who make meals for others can easily splash extra sips here and there into a stew, while I’m left trying to think of ways to use up larger quantities of vino without creating enough beef bourguignon for an army.

It’s almost enough to keep me from opening a bottle in the first place. Almost, but not quite. I have to remind myself what wine is so good for (besides drinking) and then think of ways to combine those ideas with my favorite foods.

One of the definitive works on the subject has plenty of answers: Anne Willan’s 2001 “Cooking With Wine.” Willan lives part time in France and, as she writes in the book’s preface, “It has become as natural for me to add wine to the pan as it is for the cooks who were born here.”

Wine gives food “instant complexity,” Willan writes, but deciding how to use it isn’t always simple. She cautions that young, fresh, fruity wines usually make better cooking ingredients than fuller-bodied ones, and she also says that some of the rules are meant to be broken, such as white wine for fish, eggs and white meat; red for duck, red meats and game. Indeed, one of the classic Burgundian wine dishes is oeufs en meurette (eggs cooked in red wine).

That validates something I already do: Use light red wine to cook fish. Poaching is out, unless you want your cream-colored halibut to turn grayish-purple.

But if you use just a half-inch or so of wine in a pan and cook the fish skin side down, only the barest edge along the bottom picks up a winey hue. I can live with that.

And with salmon, it’s not a problem at all.

Here are some other options:

• Deglaze pans after roasting meats.

• Poach pears or fish.

• Deepen the flavor of tomato sauces.

• Cook down wine to concentrate it and then add it directly to vinaigrettes in place of or in addition to vinegar.

• Freeze wine in ice cube trays, or just freeze a cup or more in a quart-size resealable plastic food storage bag. Because the alcohol keeps the wine from freezing solid, it is easy to break off whatever size is needed and throw it into a pan.