There’s a reason why wine and food have spent several thousand years in each other’s company – the combination is delicious.
But isn’t simply that a cold glass of white is nice with lunch, or that opening a bottle makes dinner feel more like an occasion.
What you eat can actually change how the wine in your glass tastes, making it seem fruitier, softer, fresher or, occasionally, considerably worse.
Understanding those interactions explains not only why certain classic combinations work, but why the same bottle can taste delicious alongside one dish and distinctly less delicious alongside another.
Why Does Wine Taste Better With Food?
The short answer is: because what you have just eaten changes what you taste next.
You already know this happens, even if you’ve never thought about it in relation to wine. Drink a glass of orange juice just after brushing your teeth and it tastes decidedly strange. Granted, you haven’t eaten the toothpaste, but its presence in your mouth changes how your palate perceives what comes afterwards.
Food and wine work on the same basic principle.
Wine contains a combination of acidity, sweetness, alcohol, fruit flavours and, depending on the wine, tannins. Food brings its own combination of salt, sugar, acidity, fat, bitterness and umami.
When the two meet, those components interact. The wine itself hasn’t changed, our perception of it has.
And that is really what we’re playing with when we pair food and wine.
Wine Pairing Rules at a Glance
If you only remember a few things, make them these:
- Match the weight and intensity of the wine to the dish.
- With acidic food, choose a wine with enough acidity to keep up.
- With something sweet, the wine generally needs to be at least as sweet as the food.
- Be cautious with high-alcohol wines when there’s lots of chilli/heat.
- Don’t just pair with the headline ingredient. Sauce, seasoning and cooking method can completely change what works.
- When in doubt, freshness is very rarely a bad place to start.
These aren’t commandments, but they are handy shortcuts to keep in mind.
How Does Food and Wine Pairing Work?
Most successful food and wine pairings do one of two things: they complement each other or they provide contrast.
A rich, buttery dish might be paired with a wine that shares some of that richness. That’s complementary pairing.
Or it might be paired with something fresh and acidic that cuts through the richness and makes you want another mouthful. That’s contrast.
Neither approach is inherently better – what matters is maintaining balance.
A wine that tastes beautifully balanced on its own can suddenly seem aggressively acidic, bitter or alcoholic once you start eating. The opposite is true too. Some wines you might not necessarily choose to sip on their own are described as particularly “food friendly”. Often they have fairly high acidity which, once food enters the equation, can seem to soften into the background and bring the whole pairing into balance.
How Food Changes the Taste of Wine
Once you understand these basics, that’s when the fun begins.
Salt can make wine taste softer and fruitier
Salt is one of wine’s great friends.
Salty foods can reduce our perception of bitterness and acidity, which can make the wine alongside them appear softer, rounder and more fruity.
It helps explain why salty foods are responsible for so many excellent wine pairings: oysters and fresh white wine, salty cheeses and sweet wines, or even Champagne and chips.
It’s also why adding a little more seasoning to a dish can occasionally rescue a wine pairing that isn’t quite working.
Acidity in food can make wine taste less acidic
Pair an acidic dish with a low-acid wine and the wine can suddenly seem flat.
Pair it with a wine that has plenty of acidity of its own and something rather different happens: the food makes the wine’s acidity seem less pronounced, allowing its fruit to come forward.
This is why the old advice to choose a wine at least as acidic as the food is genuinely useful.
Think Sauvignon Blanc with a sharp goat’s cheese, or a crisp Italian white alongside a tomato-heavy pizza or pasta dish.
Sweet food can make wine taste more bitter and acidic
Dessert is where many otherwise perfectly good bottles of wine go to die.
Sweet food can make a wine taste less fruity and less sweet, while exaggerating its acidity, bitterness and alcohol.
A dry red that seemed generous alongside the main course can taste surprisingly hard after a mouthful of chocolate cake. This is one reason pairing wine with chocolate can be trickier than its romantic reputation suggests.
It is also behind another of the genuinely useful pairing rules: when you’re eating something sweet, the wine generally needs to be at least as sweet as the food.
It is not because sweet things must always be served together, it is because of what the sugar in the food does to the wine.
Fat and protein can make tannins feel less aggressive
Tannin is responsible for that slightly grippy sensation you get from many red wines (or over-stewed tea).
Try a young, tannic Cabernet Sauvignon by itself and it can leave your mouth feeling almost dried out. Take a bite of a fatty steak and then try it again and those tannins can seem noticeably softer and less aggressive.
There are several things going on in that combination, including the interaction of tannins with proteins, while the wine’s structure also provides contrast against the richness of the meat.
This doesn’t mean red wine has to be served with meat, nor that meat always requires red wine, but it’s a great place to start.
Umami can make wine taste more bitter
Umami makes food delicious – think mushrooms, mature cheeses, cured meats, soy sauce and tomatoes – but foods rich in umami can be difficult for wines to deal with
The good news is that umami rarely arrives alone.
Parmesan, for example, contains both umami and salt, and that salt can help counteract some of umami’s less flattering effects on wine.
If, however, a dish is particularly high in umami, then that becomes the characteristic to focus your pairing around, as umami can make a wine seem more bitter, more acidic and less fruity, heavily tannic wines can become particularly harsh.
Look then for a wine with relatively low tannin and plenty of fruit intensity. The lower tannin gives the umami less bitterness to exaggerate, while generous fruit helps ensure the wine still tastes vibrant rather than thin or stripped back alongside the food.
Chilli can make alcohol feel hotter
That warming sensation you get from alcohol and the burn of chilli can amplify one another.
So a powerful, high-alcohol red alongside a very spicy dish can leave your mouth feeling considerably hotter than either would alone.
Lower alcohol can help, but it isn’t the only solution. Plenty of fruit intensity can stop the wine disappearing underneath all that flavour, while freshness can keep the combination lively.
What is also worth remembering when choosing wine with spicy food is that not all spice is the same. The flavours surrounding the heat in an Indian curry can be very different from those in a Thai dish or Caribbean cooking. One might be earthy and aromatic, another sharp with lime and fresh herbs, another smoky, fruity or allspice-led. So once you’ve accounted for the heat, this is where matching flavours and aromas, which we’ll come to below, becomes important.
Also note that traditional Western wine-pairing advice has often been to reach for something sweet with spicy food. There is some logic to this, as sweetness can soften the perception of chilli heat. But it can also be a rather blunt rule. After all, if you’ve deliberately put two Scotch bonnets into a dish, chances are you actually want to feel the heat, not subdue it completely. The aim of the pairing doesn’t always have to be to make the chilli disappear.
What Else Makes a Good Food and Wine Pairing?
Taste interactions are only part of the equation.
Even if you’ve successfully navigated salt, sweetness, acidity and tannin, a pairing can still feel wrong because the wine and food are mismatched in weight, intensity, texture or flavour.
Match the weight
Think of weight simply as how substantial something feels in your mouth.
A delicate poached fish and a slow-cooked beef stew occupy opposite ends of the scale. So do a light-bodied white and a powerful, full-bodied red.
Generally, you don’t want one half of the pairing completely overwhelming the other. Delicate dishes tend to suit lighter wines; richer, heavier dishes can carry wines with more body.
Importantly, though, it’s often the way something is cooked that determines its weight.
This is why there isn’t one answer to what wine goes with salmon. A simply poached fillet is quite different from salmon grilled until charred and covered in a rich sauce. The hero ingredient hasn’t changed, but the weight of the finished dish has.
Match the intensity
Weight and intensity aren’t quite the same thing.
A dish can be physically light but intensely flavoured. Think of a salad loaded with herbs, chilli, citrus and fish sauce. Conversely, something creamy can be rich in texture without being particularly powerful in flavour.
The wine needs enough flavour to still be noticeable beside the food.
This is why pairing solely according to whether something is “fish”, “chicken” or “beef” isn’t particularly useful. The sauce, spices, seasoning and cooking method may tell you far more about what the wine needs to do.
Think about texture
Crisp, sparkling wines can be particularly satisfying with fried food because the acidity and bubbles provide contrast to all that richness and crunch.
A fuller, rounder wine, meanwhile, can echo the creamy texture of a sauce rather than cutting through it.
As with wine pairing in general, neither contrast nor similarity is automatically right. You’re simply deciding whether you want the wine to mirror what’s on the plate or provide relief from it.
This is also why the old rule of “white wine with fish, red wine with meat” is far too simplistic.
A meaty fish such as tuna can comfortably handle some lighter reds, while a delicately prepared poultry dish may be overwhelmed by a powerful one.
Look for flavours and aromas that connect
Not everything about wine pairing comes down to salt, acid and tannin. Aroma matters too.
Sometimes a pairing works because the wine and food contain flavours that seem to pick up where the other left off.
An earthy Pinot Noir can echo the flavours of mushrooms. A citrusy white can pick up lemon in a dish. A wine with smoky or spicy aromas can find similar flavours in something cooked over charcoal or heavily spiced.
This doesn’t mean every flavour on the plate needs an equivalent in the glass. Often one point of connection is enough to make the combination feel more coherent.
What Matters Most When Pairing Wine With Food?
If a dish contains ten different ingredients, which one are you supposed to pair the wine with?
Usually, start with whatever dominates the experience of eating it.
That might be the sauce rather than the protein. It could be the cooking method, the spice, the acidity, or simply the richest element on the plate.
Take chicken. Roast chicken with gravy, chicken tikka, lemon chicken and a creamy chicken pie all contain the same headline ingredient, but it would make little sense to automatically serve the same wine with all four.
Instead, ask yourself three things:
- How heavy or light is the finished dish?
- What is its strongest flavour?
- Is there anything particularly acidic, sweet, salty, spicy or umami-rich that is going to change how the wine tastes?
Answer those and you’ve narrowed your options considerably.
Is There a Wine That Goes With Everything?
Sadly, no. If there were, we’d have put ourselves out of a job several paragraphs ago.
But there are a couple of useful shortcuts when you have absolutely no idea what to serve.
The first is the old food and wine maxim: what grows together, goes together.
It isn’t foolproof, but regional food and drink traditions have developed alongside each other for centuries. Italian tomato-based dishes and high-acid Italian wines are an obvious example. Muscadet and the seafood of France’s Atlantic coast are another. If you’re stuck, looking at where the food comes from can give you a very sensible place to start.
The second option is less romantic but extremely practical: choose something relatively light, fresh and neutral.
A crisp, dry white with good acidity, moderate alcohol and no particularly aggressive flavours (like a pinot grigio) probably isn’t going to blow anyone’s socks off. But if you’re serving several dishes, feeding a table of people with different tastes, or simply don’t know exactly what’s for dinner yet, it is also unlikely to offend anyone.
The same thinking explains why certain sparkling wines are such useful all-rounders. Acidity and bubbles work with an enormous range of foods, from salty snacks and fried things to seafood and lighter dishes.
Sometimes the best wine pairing isn’t the most clever one. It’s the bottle that gets along happily with everything else on the table.
Can Some Foods Make Wine Taste Strange?
Most difficult pairings can be explained by the interactions we’ve already covered. But a few foods have particular chemical characteristics that can make wine behave in genuinely unexpected ways.
Artichokes are the classic example. They contain cynarin, a compound that can temporarily alter our perception of sweetness. Take a sip of wine afterwards and it may taste oddly sweeter than it did before.
That doesn’t mean you can’t drink wine with artichokes. It does mean you need to account for the effect rather than simply treating an artichoke like any other green vegetable. Very dry, fresh wines are generally a better starting point than anything already noticeably sweet.
Asparagus presents a different problem. Its distinctive sulphurous compounds can clash with certain wines and make them seem metallic or vegetal. Rather than fighting those green flavours, wines with their own fresh, herbaceous character, Sauvignon Blanc being the obvious example, can work with them.
There are very few foods that simply “don’t go with wine”. Usually, there is a reason a pairing is difficult, but once you understand what the food is doing to the wine, you can look for a wine that works around it.
If this article has left you thirsty for more, here are a few more wine guides to build your confidence:
- Best Red Wines for Beginners
- Best White Wines for Beginners
- How to Taste Wine for Beginners
- What Makes Wines Taste So Different?
- What Makes Wine Expensive (And Is It Worth It?)
- How to Read a Wine Label