Slow Cooker Chicken Merlot is a hearty and delicious dish that requires very little prep time. After cutting up the vegetables for this tasty chicken stew, just set the timer and let the slow cooker do the rest.
Using your slow cooker to make Chicken Merlot not only makes cooking this delicious dish easy, it also allows the flavors to build during the slow cooking process.
Another favorite chicken dish is Coq au Vin. It’s not a slow cooker recipe but its amazingly delicious.
Not a fan of Merlot? Use your favorite red wine to make this dish.
Ingredients for Chicken Merlot
Let’s start by gathering the ingredients we need to make Slow Cooker Chicken Merlot. In Chef Speak, this is called the “Mise en Place,” which translates to “Everything in its Place.”
Not only does setting up your ingredients ahead of time speed up the cooking process, it also helps ensure you have everything you need to make the dish.
Simple Ingredients
- chicken pieces
- onion
- mushrooms
- carrots
- celery
- cannellini beans
- garlic cloves
- tomato paste
- merlot or dry red wine of your choice
- chicken broth
- dried basil or fresh basil
- salt
- black pepper
How to prepare Merlot Sauce
- Add the tomato paste, red wine, chicken broth and spices to a small bowl.
- Whisk the ingredients together until well blended.
How to make Slow Cooker Chicken Merlot
- Add the chopped vegetables and cannellini beans to the slow cooker.
- Place the chicken pieces on top of the vegetables.
- Pour the red wine mixture over top of the chicken. Cover and cook on low-heat setting for 5 hours or high-heat setting for 2 ½ hours.
Remove vegetables and chicken when the cooking has completed. Cover both and keep warm while you finish the sauce.
- Pour all liquid from the slow cooker into a saucepan.
- Heat the sauce over medium-high heat until it begins to boil, then reduce the heat to medium, cooking long enough to reduce the sauce by half, until the sauce is thick and clingy.
Place the mushroom mixture on top of a serving platter, topped with the chicken pieces and ladle the sauce over the chicken.
Serve the Chicken Merlot with roasted potatoes, rice, or your favorite grain. You’re going to love this slow cooker recipe.
Recipe FAQ’s
If you are not wine drinkers and find yourself with leftover wine, freeze the wine in an ice cube tray. When the wine has completely frozen, pop out the wine cubes and store in a ziplock bag in the freezer. The next time you need a little wine for a dish you can defrost a few of the wine cubes.
When it comes down to slow cooking, dark meat is the chicken of choice. This recipes uses a whole chicken, but can be made using chicken thighs and chicken legs. Dark meat holds up better in a slow cooker. Chicken breasts will tend to dry out a bit from the extended cooking time.
More Slow-Cooker Recipes
Slow Cooker Chicken Merlot
Ingredients
- 3½ lbs whole chicken cut into pieces (or parts of your choice) skin removed
- 1 large onion rough cut into chunks
- 16 ounces mushrooms cut in half or quarters
- 3 carrots peeled and rough cut
- 5 stalks celery large slice
- 16 ounces cannellini beans drained and rinsed
- 4 cloves garlic peeled but left whole
- 6 ounces tomato paste
- 8 ounces merlot or red wine of your choice
- 8 ounces chicken broth
- 1 teaspoons dried basil
- ½ teaspoon salt more or less to taste
- ¼ teaspoon black pepper more or less to taste
Instructions
- Add the tomato paste, red wine, chicken broth and spices to a small bowl
- .Whisk the ingredients together until well blended.
- Remove vegetables and chicken when the cooking has completed. Cover both and keep warm while you finish the sauce.
- Add the chopped vegetables and cannellini beans to the slow cooker.
- Place the chicken pieces on top of the vegetables.
- Pour the red wine mixture over top of the chicken.
- Cover and cook on low-heat setting for 5 hours or high-heat setting for 2 ½ hours.
- Remove the vegetables and chicken from the slow cooker and cover to keep warm.
- Pour all liquid from the slow cooker into a saucepan.
- Heat the sauce over medium-high heat until it begins to boil, then reduce the heat to medium, cooking long enough to reduce the sauce by half, until the sauce is thick and clingy.
- Place the mushroom mixture on top of a serving platter, topped with the chicken pieces and ladle the sauce over the chicken.
- Serve the Chicken Merlot with roasted potatoes, rice, or your favorite grain. You’re going to love this slow cooker recipe.
Patricia
I’m vegetarian, so I only did the sauce with veggies. It was delicious! I used mushrooms, carrots and green beans. Thank you!
Sondra Barker
Yum! The perfect dinner recipe!
Kristina
Love this- it’s so nice to find a slow coooker recipe that isn’t stew or soup!
Leslie
Stunning recipe that is slow-cooked to perfection!
Marina
Love this chicken recipe! Exactly what I needed during this winter month!
Alexandra
Such a delicious dish – full of flavour!
Elaine
This is a fabulous recipe, but I wonder if you used only 6oz of wine and 6Oz of broth you would not have to boil down the sauce as much at the end? Would this greatly impact the flavours? Thanks!
Chef Dennis Littley
hi Elaine
starting with more and reducing the sauce adds extra flavor to the sauce. You can of course reduce the amounts in the beginning and skip the reduction.
Akiko
I’m glad I found this chicken recipe. I needed more slow-cooker recipes to add to my rotation and this is perfect and delicious!
Emily Woodward
mmm, I cannot get enough of this recipe. It’s delicious. Thanks for sharing
Elizabeth
Fabulous recipe! So delicious!
Raquel
So much flavor and love that I can use my slow cooker or this!
Andrea
This is One of the best recipes I have ever made. It was delicious
I just fried everything a little before putting into slow cooker
I give it 5 stars
John
It would be nice to see British units (Kg ml etc) given so us in the UK can follow the recipie
Chef Dennis Littley
If you look under the ingredients there is an option for metric. I’m slowly updating each recipe to include the equivalents.
Joel
The flavor of the sauce was superb but I felt like never got it to the right consistency even I certainly reduced it by half or more. Maybe my expectations were wrong though. I was thinking The sauce would be more thick like a gravy or pudding but mine was more Soupy. I’m a big sauce guy though so maybe I just expected it to be saucier than it was meant to be. If I make it again I may try to make extra sauce.