If you’ve gotten nervous about pairing wine and food, you are not alone. It’s not an easy thing to do and a bad pairing is… well… bad. On Tuesday night, we enjoyed teaching a group about how to nail your holiday pairings and are sharing all of that wisdom right here. So sit back, pour a glass, and get ready to ace all of your holiday feasting.

The 3 Ways to Pair Food + Wine

Kaiya and Nancy approach wine pairings keeping three things in mind. Let’s dive in!

What Grows Together, Goes Together

Wine was made and drunk at home, so it makes sense that the grapes that grow in an area pair with food from the area. For this reason, eating cuisine from the same region as the wine is always a good idea. A perfect example is using herbs de provence in a dressing, marinade, or to roll soft cheeses in that are then enjoyed with provençal rosé. So easy. So delicious! 

Complementary Pairings

Enjoying a dish that’s creamy and soft? Grab an oaked white, which will be soft and creamy on the palate. Got buttery flavors in the food? An oaked white also works. Does the dish have fruit flavors like raisins or cranberry? A light-bodied red wine will have these notes. 

Contrasting Pairings

There’s a reason you love a filet with a big, bold Cabernet Sauvignon. The tannins in the wine scrape the fat from the dish off of your tongue, freshening your palate with each sip. Soft foods work with acidic wines and those with high tannins. Enjoying sharp cheeses? Contrast with a soft wine and see what happens!

OR…

Are you overwhelmed? Just grab a semi-dry Riesling.

Our Favorite Holiday Pairings

Here’s what we tasted, along with tips on finding the same wines, or similar ones if you want to avoid ordering online.

Christmas

Chef Cara zhuzhed up Stove Top stuffing with some walnuts and rosemary. You can easily do the same. Try browning the butter, sautéing carrots/onions/celery, adding mushrooms, or anything else. The trick is to pop the stuffing in a pyrex under the broiler to get that crispy top. We paired ours with a California off-dry Riesling (retail $29). We got the wine through Naked Wines (more info on Naked Wines at the end).

New Year’s

Chef Cara kept us carbed up with a delightful tex-mex style cornbread using green chilis and some spice. Made with creamed corn, the cornbread avoided the trap of being dry (very common with cornbread) and kept things really complex. Of course, she didn’t stop there! Chef made hot honey to drizzle over top. It was a melange of spicy-sweet softness that stayed light. We blew your everyone’s minds with an oaked California Chardonnay (remember: drink more oaked Cali Chard in 2023) from Daou that can be found locally (retail $22).

Kwanzaa

Kwanzaa brings an array of interesting flavors that can be tricky to pair. Chef Cara’s Groundnut Stew blends peanuts (notoriously hard to pair), tomato and spice and, let’s be honest, would go well with an off-dry Riesling, but Kaiya and Nancy love to show off their ability to pair, so they did! Malbec’s medium body, fruitiness and light tannins avoided any weirdness from peanuts and tannins, smoothing out both the stew and the wine, while letting the spice bring out the wine's fruitiness even more. A Pinot Noir or Gamay would have worked, too, but Malbec has a little more heft. Rather than go with Mendoza, we reached for an Alpataco 2017 Malbec from Patagonia (retail $17). You should be able to get your local shop to carry this, but if not, look for any 2017 Argentinian Malbec from Patagonia to get close!

Festivus

We may not have engaged in feats of strength or the airing of grievances at this event, but we sure aired one: the fact that sweet red wines get a bum rap. We get why, but just like oaked Cali Chards have come back from the brink, you can find some really incredible sweet red wines. The key? Look for late harvest wines. These are naturally sweet and take a lot of work which means the winemaker knows what they’re doing. Chef Cara made a sweet-chili-glazed meatloaf topped with bacon that went perfectly with the M.A.D. Dash Late Harvest Zinfandel (retail $27–this price has dropped recently!) (ordered through Naked Wines) Kaiya and Nancy poured. 

Hanukkah

The miracle of the oil is celebrated in fried foods that appear at Hanukkah. We skipped the latkes (although pair them with sparkling wine for a real treat!) and asked Chef Cara to make sufganiyot, or jelly donuts. Freshly fried and served topped with a red-wine jelly (made from 14 Hands “Hot to Trot”) these paired perfectly with a dry wine. Sure, you can do sweet with sweet, but we find that contrasting flavors really take the cake so we reached for a California Zinfandel (the complete opposite of the sweet wine) to contrast the fry and complement the fruit. The wine was a 2016 Easton Amador County Zinfandel (retail $26) which you should be able to get your local wine shop to order. It’s also available via wine.com.

How We Choose Our Wines + Where To Find Them

We buy most of our wines from various distributors in VT to keep prices down and support local. We are also members of Naked Wines and get wines from them. Naked works with winemakers to make their passion projects a reality. For example, if an established small producer in California wants to attempt to grow a rare Argentinian grape in California, Naked funds them through their membership system. Members get these wines at drastically reduced prices but not through a traditional wine-club membership. Instead, we pay $40/month which stays in our account. We can then use this money, at any point, to buy any of the many, many wines funded by Naked that are available in Vermont. We love supporting experimentation in wine and haven’t tried a wine we didn’t like.

If you’d like to try Naked, feel free to use our link to get a voucher for $100 good toward an order of $169. Full disclosure: we’ll earn a $40 credit. We’re happy to help you pick the wines or send over some pairing suggestions, just reach out.