Top pairings

The best wine pairings for cauliflower

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on February 3 2025 at 14:24

There was once little point in thinking about wine in the context of cauliflower.

It was a vegetable. It was bland - except arguably in cauliflower cheese - and generally accompanied something that was more likely to dictate the pairing like a Sunday roast.

But now it’s roasted, fried, spiced and partnered by other exotic and flavourful ingredients it has become the focus of a meal and deserves its own wine pairings. You can even have it as a ‘steak’.

So which wine should you go for? It depends as usual how you cook it - with a sauce, roasted or in a salad ...

*With a creamy sauce, in a cauliflower soup or in cauliflower cheese: smooth dry whites are the order of the day. Think unoaked or subtly oaked chardonnay like Chablis, chenin blanc, Soave, Gavi, dry pinot gris … Unless it accompanies a steak in which case stick to your usual red.

*As a caramelised cauliflower purée (very fashionable, often in the company of scallops.)
White burgundy or a similarly posh chardonnay is bang on.

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