This is a basic lack of empathy IMO. The idea that just because you and I don’t care if our kids get served a wine sauce, someone who complains about it is a “loony” is a pretty selfish attitude.
A “lack of empathy” argument would be appropriate if this mother had a pathological fear of wine analogous to a fear of spiders. But not if she is just being unreasonable and stupid.
Otherwise we can just turn it around. Why do you lack empathy with the people who feel this mother is a loony?
Hell - my idea of fine cuisine is rice and beans - which I doubt would benefit from addition of wine! I would never spend the time making these multiple reductions as described, and on the rare occasions that we use red sauce, it comes in a jar.
I should stay out of such threads, because for me food is just fuel, and not at all worth the effort so many people put into it.
I’d be fine with the wine, but would object if the friend gave my kid an after dinner cigarette.
But its not reasonable to assume that all your kids friends are from an very alcohol tolerant community (and by no means do you have to be a strict Muslim or LDS to want your kids not to eat a wine sauce). Another one of my daughters schoolmates looks absolutely like the WASPey hipster suburban families that predominate at her school (and has a western last name), but is actually his mum an Indian Muslim and their family identifies as Muslim. They aren’t particularly strict Muslims, but would be pretty upset I’m sure if their kid was served a wine same.
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Opposite? A puritan or a glutton, you decide 
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I sometimes self identify as a gourmand.
If it is, it is one that, in my experience, is believed by and taught by master chefs.
Given that there are chemicals that are soluble in alcohol that are not in water or oil, it seems to make sense as well.
I’ve found that once you’ve made your own sauces, it’s really hard to stand the stuff that comes out of a can.
I wonder if this mom asks about any wine content in the food they get when they go out for dinner. If she does, then she should have told her friend about it beforehand, that she didn’t want her kids served anything with any type of alcohol in it. If she doesn’t, then she may be surprised at how many times the kids have ingested food that was cooked with some amount of alcohol used in the prep in the past.
Having a pasta sauce with wine in it is not an unexpected edge case for pasta sauces. Why get “furious” about it after the fact, when a more productive response might have been, “ah, whoops. I forgot that pasta sauces sometimes contain wine (or sherry or whatnot) in them. My friend probably didn’t realize that or didn’t think it was inappropriate to serve to a child, so I should, next time, tell anybody feeding my kids not to use wine in the sauce”?
A tiny amount of wine in cooking sauce is not “very alcohol tolerant”.
If you have very strict requirements, the burden is on you to say so, not on the host to issue a questionnaire covering the vast spectrum of possible dietary strictures.
Yep. My kids love just a 28oz can of ground tomatoes (or similar; Bianco Dinapoli tomatoes if using whole) with olive oil, garlic, and nothing else. Maybe a sprinkle of oregano. Or the butter + onion tomato sauce from Marcella Hazan. They jarred stuff tastes weird to them now (and it does to me. God do I dislike almost all jarred sauces, save for Rao’s, which is too expensive for my tastes.)
Just because we don’t share it, “Don’t serve my kid food with booze in it” is not a “strict requirement”. A significant percentage of families will hold that belief, a majority it lots of places. The unreasonable assumption is that if you drop your kid of somewhere you should have to explicitly say “don’t give my kid any food with booze in it”, rather than the onus be on the person giving your kid a wine sauce to check if its OK.
Generally as I said its considered common courtesy nowadays to run it past the parents, with a list of ingredients, before giving any kid that’s not in your family any food.
Well no, because every single restaurant (in the US or UK) would state very clearly if a dish has wine in it, and would never put wine in an item on the kids menu.
Once my kids were past the age where they’d just sit in a highchair and eat some Cheerios, I don’t remember ever ordering their meal from a kid’s menu.
Here is the cite that you are looking for.
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/menu-labeling-requirements
Please tell me where you see that requirement.
I assure you, from rather extensive personal experience in the restaurant industry, that your claim is not in fact the case.
If you have other information, I’d love to see it cited.
I don’t believe that is true. I just looked at a couple local Italian joints and their bolognese does not mention any ingredients, much less wine which is almost certainly used. And none of the Chinese joints I’ve been to mention Shaoxing wine, which I’m sure many use. And many kids don’t order from the kids menu. Mine generally do not.
I’d reverse that and say do you have a counter example? I wasn’t claiming it was a legal requirement, but it absolutely is a convention in any restaurant I’ve been to in the US or UK.
Randomly chosen chain Italian restaurant menu here, you’ll notice all the sauces (even the dip) that has wine clearly say so:
I would t be surprised if the lasagna bolognese has wine. The presence of alcohol is indicated if it’s a defining point of the sauce. Just because you see some items with alcohol mentioned in them doesn’t mean others don’t.
I’m not going to say the parents shouldn’t tell you and again, the mother should absolutely not have been “furious” but I don’t know that she really even knew she would have a problem before it happened. I mean, I didn’t ever tell anyone who might feed my kids that I didn’t want them to have a beer or glass of wine with dinner. Just the same as it might not occur to someone that their bolognese has wine in it , it wouldn’t occur to me that anyone would give an 8 year old a beer or glass of wine with dinner. I would absolutely tell them if I didn’t want my kid to have soda, because in my experience people do serve 8 year olds soda. But if it never occurred to me that someone would give a kid sauce with wine in it ( and it’s not even like all red sauces have wine) then I’m not going to tell them in advance just like I probably wouldn’t tell them the kids allergic to lobster if they didn’t mention that’s what they were planning for dinner.
I know that Muslims vary in their approach to this. If they’re observant they usually wouldn’t want anything cooked with wine, but some do not consider it unimportant if the amount of alcohol is insufficient to be intoxicating. I know one guy who would not eat food made with vinegar because vinegar was made from wine, but his wife thought he was crazy and said there is no such prohibition.
I would be surprised - it wouldn’t surprise me at all if a small local restaurant put wine in their sauce and didn’t mention it but I think a big chain like Romano’s or Olive Garden would mention it if only to avoid problems with people who have religious or other restrictions regarding alcohol.