The dangers of pairing wine to food

1 April 2024

Pairing wine with food is all about finding the perfect combination. The wine and the food together should enhance your dining experience.

There are lots of books and apps out there ready to tell you what you should and shouldn’t be drinking with a particular meal. There is no harm in reading them and taking the advice they offer, but if you don’t agree with the advice, that is absolutely fine.

It is all too easy to get wrapped up in ‘the rules’, but everyone should be free to make their own choices based on their own personal tastes, without feeling that they are in some way wrong. Otherwise, something which should be a pleasure becomes a stressful situation.

There is a myth that to enjoy wine, you should be able to ‘understand’ it. That takes years of experience, which most people don’t have. The good news is, it’s not actually necessary to understand wine on any sort of deep level. The only thing you should understand about wine is enjoyment.

By tasting lots of wines and combining them with lots of foods, you will come to understand the really important thing – which wine is best for you.

a group of people are toasting with wine glasses

Pairing wine and food

If you are confused about food and wine combinations, speak to us here at Three Choirs Vineyard or at a wine shop rather than the supermarket for some advice to get you started. Tell them your budget and what you are planning to cook and they will be able to come up with some suggestions.

This will give you ideas to use in future, as you start to understand the right pairings for you and the people you are cooking for.

Food tends to affect the taste of the wine more than the wine affects the taste of the food.

If the food is sweet, the wine might taste more bitter, more acid, less fruity and less sweet. If the food is salty, the wine will taste less bitter, more fruity and less acid. If the dish is acidic, the wine will taste less bitter, less acid, more fruity and softer.

There are some general rules that many people follow, which seem to work well. In short, full-bodied wines tend to go well with full-flavoured dishes, while lighter wines with less alcohol tend to complement food with more subtle flavours.

Some of these basic rules are:


  • Salty foods, such as fish, work well with white wines. Champagne and sparkling wines also complement seafood.
  • Spicy foods can be overwhelming with some wines, but a sweet white wine can help reduce the heat of the food. Others might prefer a fruity red wine with a spicy curry.
  • Red meats work well with red wine, while white meats, such as chicken, tend to work better with white wine, including sparkling wines.
  • Sweet foods should be paired with a wine which tastes sweeter than the food, or the wine will be overwhelmed by the food and lose its flavour.

several bottles of three choirs wine are lined up on a table

No rights or wrongs

The danger with food and wine pairings is that there is so much information out there, that it can become overwhelming and take all the pleasure out of drinking wine.

Enjoying wine with dinner should be one of life’s pleasures and the feeling that you’re drinking the ‘wrong’ wine can take away some of that pleasure. But there are no rights or wrongs, and nobody should judge you for your choices. If you prefer a white wine, there is no reason why you can’t drink it with red meat.

A wine you love combined with food you love will generally taste amazing. But that might just be because it’s good food and good wine, not that it is some magical combination which is greater than the sum of its parts.

Sometimes you might pair a wine and food which aren’t the right combination for you. That isn’t a great problem, because you will know not to pair them again in future, and you can continue to experiment with better combinations.

Variable factors

When you drink wine, there’s lots of factors going on which influence how you personally taste that wine. And that will be different for everyone.

There are lots of variables which influence how we each perceive a wine. These range from how well rested and hydrated you are to what you ate or drank before the first sip of wine, what kind of emotional state you are in and even the influence of knowing the price of the wine. And that is before we take into account that everyone tastes things slightly differently.

A sour tasting meal will taste much sourer for some people than for others. So, a wine recommended to pair perfectly with that meal will taste great for some people but may taste unpleasant for others. That means even an absolute sure-fire combination of food and wine will still be a ‘failure’ for some people because there are just too many variables to take into account.

When it comes to pairing wine to food, there is no ‘wrong’. There is no shame in choosing a combination which isn’t recommended by the experts or that your friends and family don’t think is right. The only important thing is to enjoy the food and to enjoy the wine.

If you choose food you like and wine you like, you can’t go wrong. You can take and follow advice from books or apps or from a waiter in a restaurant, but you shouldn’t expect it to be something more magical than it actually is.

And if you do choose a wine which really doesn’t work at all with what you’re eating, simply put the cork back in and put it away in the fridge to enjoy tomorrow on its own or with a different meal! What is so bad about that?

The danger of pairing wine to food is that pursuing the perfect combination takes away some of the joy of just eating and drinking. The truth is that there is always more than one right combination of food and wine. In fact, there are generally many bottles of wine that are right for a particular dish and very few that are wrong.
And if you’re drinking a wine you like with food you enjoy, but the combination isn’t perfect, does it really matter? You are still enjoying good food and good wine, and that is a win in most people’s eyes.

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When is the right time to pick the grapes?

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As August draws to an end, the team at Three Choirs Vineyard are gearing up ready for our harvest. But when is the right time to pick the grapes? We don’t have a definite set date for the annual harvest; it all depends on the weather. This year, it looks likely to start a bit early – probably in the first week of September - because of all the good weather we’ve had this summer. That is about 10 days to two weeks earlier than usual. As the climate is changing, the trend is towards picking earlier than we used to. But the harvest still takes the same amount of time. Generally, we would expect the harvest to last for about 10 weeks, but this will depend on what the weather is like and the quantity and quality of grapes on our vines. Here at Three Choirs, we have 14 different varieties of grapes, and they all ripen at slightly different times. The first grape we will pick is Siegerrebe, which is a pinky orange colour when ripe. Siegerrebe makes a white wine, because, as with most grapes, all the colour is in the skin and not the juice inside. Siegerrebe takes 76 days from flowering until the fruit is ready to pick. The timing really is as specific as that! All of the grape varieties have precise timings, although some of them are longer than others. Thomas Shaw, managing director, said: “It’s been a good year, with lots of sunshine. The grapes are fairly small, but that means they should have a nice concentration of flavours and sugars, which is what we need. We don’t need big fat grapes like you get in the supermarket, because they’re full of water.” It hasn’t just been a warm, sunny year, it has been a very dry one too. Will that affect our harvest? Thomas continued: “There was a lot of moisture in the ground early in the year. The roots of our vines go down 12 to 15 foot, so there is still enough moisture down there for them. “Grapes are different from other crops. Some farmers have been struggling this year because their crops have very small roots, and the ground is far too dry for them.” Picking is all done by hand. Fruit is picked and pressed on the same day. Thomas said: “To maximise the quality, we don’t pick when it’s rainy. If it’s raining, we can get a lot of wet fruit into the winery, which dilutes the wine.” So here’s hoping for a dry harvest! Early indications are that 2025 will be a successful year for grapes at Three Choirs. Flowering in late June and early July is a key time for our harvest, and the weather was just what we needed at that time. September and October will be the final decider if 2025 is a good quality year for our wines.
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Three Choirs hits the headlines

27 June 2025
Three Choirs Vineyards was recently featured in the national media. Not only was it named in the feature 11 of the best vineyard stays in the UK in The Times online, it also had an entire feature devoted to it in the Express online and appeared in the world’s longest running women’s magazine. The People’s Friend is a weekly magazine full of lifestyle, cooking and gardening features, along with short stories and fiction serials. Ahead of English Wine Week (21st to 29th June), we were featured in an article highlighting three UK vineyards – Aldwick Estate in Bristol, Chet Valley Vineyard in Norfolk and, of course, Three Choirs Vineyards, right here in Gloucestershire. The article said there are more than 1,000 vineyards in the UK and that winemaking is one of the fastest growing sectors of agriculture. We’re pleased to say that The People’s Friend said Three Choirs is a ‘top-drawer example’ of an English vineyard, producing around 250,000 bottles a year. The article quotes our managing director, Thomas Shaw, who said: “Three Choirs Vineyard’s focus is the quality of the wines and the visitor experience.” He added: “As the climate changes, more and more varieties can be grown in the UK.” The article shared that most of our wine is sold direct to customers online, to wine merchants or consumed by guests at our brasserie at the vineyard, with a small number of bottles sold to Waitrose. The People’s Friend chose one favourite wine from each of the three producers featured. Its choice from Three Choirs was the Coleridge Hill 2023 – a dry white wine produced from Madeleine Angevine and Phoenix grapes. The magazine said: “With its fresh fruity aromas, especially apple, it’s zesty on the palate thanks to the ripe fruit flavours, and offers a long, crisp finish.”
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Meet our Winemaker

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Martin Fowke is Three Choirs Vineyard’s winemaker. Now aged 62, he has been with us for over 40 years, having joined in 1984. He studied agriculture and horticulture at the Royal Agricultural College (now Royal Agricultural University) in Cirencester and went to Three Choirs for some work experience. Martin said he ‘fell into’ the industry. He met a girl, who he has now been happily married to for many years. Her father ran an apple and blackcurrant farm and planted a vineyard in 1973. Three Choirs Vineyard was born… He joined when the company was in its infancy and worked his way up quickly. Martin joked: “I was the only one who knew how to use a computer!” He left Three Choirs briefly in the 1980s to go travelling. On his travels, he went to the wine making regions of Australia, New Zealand and California and picked up some tips along the way. On his return to Gloucestershire in 1989, Martin took over the winemaking side of the business. Martin said: “I wasn’t officially trained, there wasn’t the training that is available to young people these days. I worked with my father in law and learned on the job. I had some very good teachers.” Our winemaker loves his job and says he has never looked back since those early days. English winemaking can be more challenging than in other parts of the world, but Martin’s experience means he’s seen it all before and can adapt and change as needed. He said: “Compared to the rest of the world, the English climate is traditionally less reliable. We have different challenges every year, which gives us the opportunity to do different things every year, and the grapes allow us to make lots of different wines. “Now England is considered a bona fide wine producing country. Climate change means we get more consistency with the weather and therefore the grapes and the wine. “Compared to the rest of the England, Three Choirs Vineyard has mild weather, with protection from the Welsh mountains, Cotswold hills and Malvern hills. We get good sunlight and relatively low rainfall. It’s ideal for vines!” Being a relatively small vineyard, Martin enjoys the opportunity to experiment, alongside producing the high quality wines our customers love. “We have a responsibility to produce consistent wines, but the beauty of what we do here is I also have the latitude to be able to experiment. We’re always trying new things and different things. “Our latest success is an orange wine. This is produced in different parts of the world, but not in England. “We’re always looking to change and develop. People’s tastes don’t stay still, and the market doesn’t stay still, so we’re always evolving.” Of all the wines we produce, does Martin have a favourite? “They’re like children – it’s impossible to choose just one! I’m proud of most of them. The newer wines that come on are always interesting. But the ones I hang my hat on are Bacchus and Siegerrebe.” After more than 40 years of winemaking in the Gloucestershire countryside, is Martin ready to move on? “I’ve got a very good team here, who make my life easier. We’ve got a good succession in place, but I don’t plan on retiring any time soon!”
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