How to Pair Wine with Food: What Thirty Years of Dinner Taught Me

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 06:00:00 -0500

One night in 2003, I was eating dinner at a small restaurant in Oaxaca that I found by walking away from the tourist center until the menus stopped being in English. I ordered a plate of mole negro, the kind that takes three days to make and tastes like it, and the server brought a glass of wine I hadn’t ordered. It was a local red I’d never heard of, made from a grape I couldn’t pronounce, and it cost roughly two dollars by the carafe. I drank it with the mole and I didn’t fully understand what was happening until I was three-quarters through the plate. The wine and the food were talking to each other in a language I’d never been taught but could suddenly hear.

Food Pairing on Sunday Evening Review

How to Pair Wine with Food: What Thirty Years of Dinner Taught Me