What wine with what dish?

The classic pairings, dish by dish. Benchmarks, not rules: your taste comes first.

Caviste applies these pairings to your own cellar: type the dish in the search, the app ranks your bottles by affinity and peak. Discover the app.

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Fish and seafood

Meat

Stews and crowd-pleasers

Cheese and mountain dishes

Spicy and Mediterranean food

Aperitif, starters and festive food

Desserts

Three benchmarks that rarely fail

Weight before colour

A delicate dish and a powerful wine cancel each other out: match the intensity first, and the colour follows. Roast chicken wants a supple red, a rich stew a dense one, and the same logic moves fish from a taut white to a rounder one as soon as a sauce is involved.

The sauce decides, not the meat

Veal in a cream sauce calls for a white Burgundy, the same veal with morels for a light red. The preparation is what settles it, which is why one ingredient switches camp from recipe to recipe: look up your dish, not your meat.

When in doubt, go regional

A wine born next to the dish grew up with it: Savoie with raclette, Alsace with sauerkraut, Cahors with cassoulet, Chianti with tomato pasta. That pairing almost never fails.

The two classic traps

A tannic red with fish turns metallic and bitter: that is tannin meeting iodine, not a matter of taste. And a dry wine with a sweet dessert tastes sharp and thin: the dish should never be sweeter than the wine, which is why sweet and fortified wines own the dessert and chocolate pages.

The right wine, but at the right time

The best pairing still disappoints on a bottle opened too young: tannin hides everything the pairing was meant to reveal. Ageing by appellation gives the drinking window of every wine listed here.