Sometime this month, I’m going to make Coq au Vin for the first time. My starting point is probably going to be this alleged Julia Child recipe.
But… I figured I’d see what people here think, since there seems to be a lot of considerably different recipes out there, including whether to use white or red wine.
I’d enjoy reading anyone’s comments who has experience with this dish.
On thing in particular: Is it really necessary/desirable to strain the sauce? That does seem to be common to most recipes, but I’m a big fan of simplicity and I do like the more rustic aspects of this type of dish, which might include a lot of cooked bits from the starting point.
I make it with a pinot noir/Burgundy/Beaujoulais (I’ve never seen it with white wine) and I generally do separate out the solids, degrease, and then add in the onions and mushrooms toward the end of cooking. The dish is more-or-less a chicken version of beef bourguignon.
I useDelia Smith’s version - very simple but very good 
She uses red wine and doesn’t do any straining. Note the reference to dry cider (instead of wine) is to British, alcoholic, cider!
I’d leave all the bits in myself to make a heartier sauce for my own tastes. The recipe links to a simple ragout which you could use. I’d simply brown the chicken in bacon grease to get a very similar flavor. It’s difficult to get small chickens which would qualify as a fryer, so I prefer to buy whole and cut them into smaller pieces. But you could get a cut up chicken, or just your desired parts, and just spend a little longer in the browning and simmering.
Any dark red wine should do. I’ve had something like Chicken Marsala made with a white wine instead and it was quite good. So I imagine almost any wine will do.
The picture looks awesome!
Maybe red in winter and white in summer, but this looks mainly like a winter dish.
There’s not anything really to strain there, and she tells you to pull out the herbs. I’m assuming the straining in the Julia Child recipe is to strain out the tomato skins, the seeds, and the herbs. When I’m being fussy, I strain it, refrigerate the sauce for as long as it takes for a “fatcap” to form (usually, just do it overnight), and then remove the fat. There’s a lot of fat in coq au vin and, as much as I love fat, degreasing it really does lead to a much more pleasant consistency and mouthfeel. Sometimes I’m lazy and skip this step, but it really is nicer defatted. It’s still plenty “rustic.”