With the right vinegar to complement it, a simple salad can take on a wonderful complexity.
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For a wine lover, "vinegar" is something of a dirty word. It's what happens when a good bottle turns to the acid Dark Side (hence its name, from vin aigre, or "sour wine"). Granted, wine vinegar can be pretty nasty -- if you're buying some supermarket brand, that is. But if you've reached the point where even your humblest weeknight wines are selected with loving care, then why are you still keeping that lollipop-red plonk in your pantry?

For more fashionable dressing options, stroll the condiment aisle of any gourmet shop or flip through the pages of any fancy-foods mail-order catalog. Lusher, older, more characterful wine vinegars have arrived -- lots of them. They come from France, Spain, Italy, California, even Germany and Austria, and they're made from all manner of wines -- everything from Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay to Gewürztraminer and Châteauneuf-du-Pape.

"Wine vinegar is finally getting the respect it has long deserved," says Paul Ferrari of Ferrari Foods, a California-based importer and retailer of gourmet Italian products. Balsamico, which is made from grape must, not wine, paved the way, he says. Americans loved that, and still do, but their loyalties are shifting as they discover new flavors.

If you're going to upgrade, you'll have to spend more. It will be worth it. If you're not convinced, try that red Heinz (12 oz./$2.89) alongside the artisanal Cabernet Sauvignon vinegar (17.5 oz./$10) made by Sparrow Lane Vineyards in Napa Valley. The Heinz tastes mostly of acid and smells of red Jell-O. But the Sparrow Lane has a winy, herbal nose and a warm, fruity base that supports its high acidity. It's still plenty puckery, but it's full-flavored and balanced. A world of difference, in other words, for just 33 cents more per ounce.

Wine turns to vinegar when airborne bacteria called acetobacters get into it and ferment it again, converting the alcohol to acetic acid and water. Of course, it takes more than that to make good wine vinegar. The best are made from high-caliber wine that the winemaker has deemed too acidic for drinking. They're aged in wood barrels for months or years, and emerge smelling and tasting of the essence of the wine they're made from. And they can add fascinating dimensions not just to salads, but to soups, sauces, marinades, braising liquids, even desserts. "Vinegars are sour because they have been fermented," says Steve Johnson, chef at the Blue Room in Boston. "That's the essential difference between them and, say, lemon juice. There's a lot more complexity."

At the Blue Room, Johnson's popular roast chicken comes dressed in pan juices spiked with rich, old Sherry vinegar. He's also a fan of the creamy, lightly nutty Champagne vinegar from J. LeBlanc, which he uses in a simple Champagne-mustard vinaigrette. At Daniel, in New York, Daniel Boulud is experimenting with wine vinegars from -- surprise -- Japan, made at a 116-year-old winery called Château Lumière. "I like their seasoned white wine-wine vinegar," he says. "It's infused with lemon balm, peppermint and honey -- an unusual combination, very fragrant and delicate." He reduces the vinegar to a syrupy glaze, then uses it to deglaze and caramelize bay scallops.

At Al Forno, in Providence, R.I., chefs Joanne Killeen and George Germon put up cherries and raspberries in cinnamon, sugar and red-wine vinegar they make themselves in a big barrel in the back of the kitchen. Tastings leftovers are poured in periodically; sometimes vinegar is drawn out and steeped in herbs and spices -- "a trick we picked up from a friend in Sicily," says Killeen. Wine vinegar shows up in dish after dish. "A lot of food needs acid balance. If you use wine vinegar at the end or just before serving, you get all the benefit. Sometimes it takes just the tiniest bit to counterbalance richness."

The wine-vinegar universe may be wide, but it's easy to master, particularly if you already know something about wine. When you taste and smell a wine vinegar, imagine it imparting sparkle to food, complementing it much the way wine does. Think of Williams-Sonoma's luscious Sauternes vinegar on poached peaches, for instance, or the LeBlanc Champagne vinegar on a green salad tossed with blue cheese, walnuts and pears. Taste any piquant and youthful red-wine vinegar and think chutney, caponata, bean salad, pasta e fagioli. If it's older and richer (from Sherry, for instance), imagine it on wilted winter greens, or in escabèche, gazpacho or sautéed wild mushrooms.

Sometimes you can even drink it. The Grateful Palate, an Oxnard, Calif.-based fancy-foods mail-order company, has introduced two liqueurlike wine vinegars from Germany that can, like rare old balsamico, be consumed as digestifs. A growing number of German producers are now turning out vinegars made from dessert wines, and these, by a small company called VITIS, are stunning examples. There's an eiswein blended with quince, a viscous amber elixir that has all the acid wallop required of a good vinegar but plenty of ethereal fruit, too. The Pinot Noir with plum is the dark beauty of the pair, as far from supermarket vinegar as Mountain Chablis is from a ripe Château d'Yquem.

Leave an open bottle of sulfite-stabilized wine out on a kitchen counter, and it won't likely turn to vinegar. But conversion proceeds apace when a vinegar maker catalyzes fermentation with starter vinegar or "mother" bacteria. Sitting still in a barrel, it takes a few months to become 100 percent vinegar. If agitated in a bacteria-seeded stainless steel tank, it can take as little as 13 hours. Not surprisingly, this is a shortcut not worth taking.

All the good wine vinegars now on the market are converted slowly. Some makers, like the famed Piedmontese chef Cesare Giaccone, use the "Orléans method," so called after the French city where the technique was developed in the 18th century. Under Giaccone's restaurant in Albaretto della Torre, wine sits in partially filled barrels with holes drilled up top. Acetobacters filter in; water and carbon dioxide evaporate out. As vinegar is used, it's replaced with fresh wine, which infuses the venerable, concentrated liquid with livelier flavor. The results are exciting: a line of sophisticated, mature-tasting vinegars -- Barolo, Moscato and Arneis -- that are very Piedmontese in style. The Barolo is particularly interesting: rich, sweet and a little musky, with a feisty acid tingle.

In Daly City, Calif., near San Francisco Bay, Ruth and Larry Robinson are applying the same technique to California varietals, using oak barrels they get secondhand from local vintners. In their aging room in a concrete industrial building, they keep about 5,000 gallons of their Kimberley vinegar "moving," as Larry puts it, though that's hardly what it's doing. The Robinsons get their wine from regional producers, though only one, the Sherry-maker Gibson, will let them disclose where it's from. "They don't want to be associated with vinegar," Larry chuckles. His French-American sparkling-wine supplier insisted that he sign a confidentiality agreement.

Kimberley vinegars, made from Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, cream Sherry and Champagne-style sparkling wines, have a straightforward, polished quality that's very New World. The golden Chardonnay vinegar is oaky and toasty, the garnet-red Cabernet front-loaded with fruit. "I want full-bodied flavor that can hold its own against the acetic acid," says Larry. "If you start with good wine, the fruity acids will show through."

In Catalonia, Spain, Cellers Puig & Roca S.A., maker of Augustvs wines, produces a potent ruby vinegar called Forvm with Cabernet Sauvignon wine and must. It's made like Sherry vinegar: Each year just a little is drawn out of the Orléans-style oak and chestnut barrels, and the rest is left to continue aging. The resulting vinegar is smooth and toothsome enough to sip through a thin straw or drizzle over strawberries. In Spain, it's used in candy -- bite through a chocolate shell and out oozes, that's right, sweet Cabernet vinegar. It's fermented in stone huts set in the vineyards, to keep airborne acetobacters from the vinegar a safe distance from the wine.

In Orléans, France, itself, the 204-year-old Martin Pouret company employs the Orléans method right on the Loire, where dozens of vinaigreries once processed the soured local wines that came off barges there. Jean-François Martin, whose family married into the business in 1904, believes he is the last Orléans-style producer in France. He's got a few thousand barrels in his old attic factory, each containing some 240 liters of vinegar. "There's no pushing of the fermentation -- it's completely natural," says Martin. "We respect the wine throughout the process." His bright, all-purpose varietal vinegars (Cabernet, Chardonnay and Muscadet) were developed for the U.S. market -- French buyers prefer a blend. But "Americans don't know how to use our products," he sniffs. "They are just beginning to understand."

Perhaps. But if the burgeoning supply of top-quality wine vinegars is any indication, we're catching on real fast.

A.G. Ferrari sells Italian vinegars only, including those made by Cesare Giaccone. (877) 878-2783; www.agferrari.com

Formaggio Kitchen, in Boston, carries Forvm, J. LeBlanc and excellent aged Sherry vinegar called Cepa Vieja, among others. (888) 212-3224

Grateful Palate is currently the only purveyor of VITIS vinegars in the United States. (888) 472-5283

Katz and Company sells vinegars from Sparrow Lane, among others. (800) 676-7176; www.katzandco.com

Williams-Sonoma has Sauternes vinegar and more. (877) 812-6235; www.williams-sonoma.com

Zingerman's of Ann Arbor, Mich. has a big, diverse selection that includes Kimberley varietals, plus hard-to-find eiswein, trockenbeerenauslese and Gewürztraminer vinegars from germany. Zingerman's Guide to Good Vinegar, also available by mail order, is an entertaining and informative read, though unabashedly biased towards the labels available at the store. (888) 636-8162; www.zingermans.com