Hey Reader—
I spent this past weekend deep in the Columbia Gorge, in eastern Washington, for a trip my sister and I take every October without fail. We stayed at Sagecliffe Resort, right next door to Cave B Estate Winery and the Gorge Amphitheatre, and the weekend was exactly what I needed post-harvest season: spa treatments, hiking, wine tasting, steak dinners. Cozy, indulgent, and exactly what I needed heading into fall.
It also fully put me in the fall spirit, which means: soup season!
Now, I don’t think soup technically counts as a meal (I have had this argument with more friends than I can count, and I am not backing down). But I’m not immune to its charms, and this chillier weather has had me craving a warm bowl paired with the right glass of something. So I decided to dedicate this issue to wine and soup pairing fundamentals: the styles, the logic, and exactly what to pour with eight of fall’s most popular soups.
Let’s get into it.
Cheers,
Sip Smarter: Your Weekly Wine Lesson
How to Pair Wine With Soup
Soup has a reputation as one of the hardest things to pair with wine. You’re pouring a liquid next to a liquid. The temperature is wrong for a lot of wines. And the ingredients are usually all blended or simmered together rather than sitting neatly on a plate.
But once you stop trying to match soup the way you’d match a steak with wine, it actually gets pretty simple.
With soup, the two things that matter most aren’t really the individual ingredients — they’re texture and weight. Is it light and brothy, or thick enough to coat a spoon? And temperature and richness. Is it something you want a wine to cut through, or something you want a wine to echo?
A few ground rules before we get into specific soups:
- Match intensity to intensity. A delicate broth gets overwhelmed by a big, bold wine. A rich, creamy soup will make a delicate wine taste like nothing at all.
- Acid is your best friend. High-acid wines cut through cream, fat, and richness the same way a squeeze of lemon would. This is why so many soup pairings lean toward crisp whites or bright reds rather than big, soft ones.
- You can match or contrast. With creamy soups especially, you’ve got two good options: mirror the richness with something equally rich (an oaked Chardonnay with a cream-based soup), or contrast it with something bright and cutting (a crisp white or even sparkling wine). Both work. It depends on whether you want the wine to blend in or wake things up.
- Don’t sleep on bubbles. Sparkling wine might be the single most versatile soup pairing there is. The acidity cuts richness, and the bubbles act almost like a palate cleanser between spoonfuls.
With that, let’s talk about eight specific soups, broken into three categories: broths, cream-based, and a few famous classics.
Broth-Based Soups
Chicken Noodle Soup is delicate, so treat it delicately. A light, crisp white like Pinot Grigio or an unoaked Chardonnay (like a Chablis) won’t fight the broth. If you want to go a little more old-school and wine-nerdy, a dry sherry — Fino or Manzanilla — adds a nutty, savory layer without adding weight.
Chicken Tortilla Soup has more going on: tomato, chiles, corn, lime. This is where Grüner Veltliner shines. Its white-pepper spice and bright acidity can stand up to the chile heat without getting lost. A dry rosé is a great alternative too; the touch of fruit softens the spice while the acidity keeps things clean.
Pho, with its deeply savory, star anise and cinnamon-scented broth, it goes well a wine with a little aromatic sweetness to match that warm spice. Off-dry Riesling is the textbook pairing — its citrus and floral lift plays beautifully with the broth’s spice, and a touch of residual sugar helps tame any chile heat from the sriracha or jalapeños on the side. If you’d rather go red, skip anything tannic (it’ll clash with the broth) and reach for something light and low-tannin instead, like Pinot Noir or Gamay/Beaujolais.
Cream-Based Soups
Butternut Squash & Pumpkin Soups are naturally sweet, especially once roasted, and that’s the key to pairing them. The wine needs its own fruit and a touch of richness, or it’ll taste thin and bitter next to the soup. Off-dry Riesling, Gewürztraminer, or Viognier work beautifully. Their aromatic, slightly honeyed character mirrors the squash instead of competing with it.
Broccoli Cheddar Soup is rich and cheesy, which calls for a wine with some weight of its own. A buttery, lightly oaked Chardonnay is the classic move. It echoes the creaminess rather than cutting against it.
Creamy Mushroom Soup is all about umami and earthiness, and the textbook pairing is Pinot Noir. The wine’s own earthy, forest-floor notes mirror the mushrooms, while its acidity keeps the pairing from feeling heavy — which, is a great excuse to reach for an Oregon bottle. If you’d rather stay in whites, an oaked Chardonnay works too, mirroring the cream instead. I like a classic Burgundy here.
Seafood & Clam Chowder wants acid and salinity to match its brininess. Muscadet is the classic, almost legendary pairing — crisp, mineral, and built to cut through a creamy chowder. But this is also where sparkling is fantastic: the bubbles slice through the cream, and the acidity plays beautifully with the brine.
Hearty Soups
French Onion Soup is all about caramelized onion sweetness and that blanket of melted Gruyère. A light, bright red with soft tannins (Beaujolais / Gamay is a great choice) cuts through the cheese without competing with it.
Zuppa Toscana (sausage, kale, potato, cream, a little heat) wants something with enough acid to cut the richness but enough warmth to match the Italian sausage. A medium-bodied Italian red like Chianti or Sangiovese does both at once. If you’d rather stay white, a dry Vermentino or Soave offers the same cutting acidity in a lighter package.
Chili & Hearty Bean Soups need a wine that can stand up to spice and heavy, meaty flavor. Zinfandel and Malbec are both built for this — enough fruit and body to hang with the chili powder and beef without getting steamrolled. And if you want a genuinely fun move, pour bubbles instead. The effervescence resets your palate between bites the way a good contrast pairing should.
Forget trying to match every spice and ingredient in the pot. Think texture, think acid, and when in doubt, remember that a glass of something bubbly is almost never the wrong answer.
If you want all of this in one place to keep on your phone or stuck to the fridge, I’m resending my Food & Wine Pairing Cheat Sheet — you should have gotten this when you first joined the newsletter, but here it is again: Food & Wine Pairing Cheat Sheet
Vine To Glass
Wine Of The Week: Cave B Estate Winery Méthode Champenoise Blanc de Blancs
This was the bottle my sister and I had sent up to our room at Sagecliffe to kick off the weekend — poured on the porch, overlooking the Gorge, before we’d even unpacked.
Cave B Estate Winery and Sagecliffe sit practically on top of each other in Quincy, Washington. Both were built by the same family, Vince and Carol Bryan, who planted their first vineyard on the site back in 1979. A few years later, they turned a dusty hillside on the property into a natural amphitheater for a winery grand opening — and that amphitheater eventually became the Gorge Amphitheatre. So the venue my sister and I were staying next to, and the winery that sent up our bubbles, and the concert hill a five-minute walk away, all trace back to the same family’s vineyard.
The winery itself is run today by winemaker Freddy Arredondo, a former professional chef who married into the family and has been Cave B’s head winemaker since 2008. Cave B makes its wines entirely from 100% estate-grown fruit in the Ancient Lakes of Columbia Valley AVA.
The wine
This is their 2022 Blanc de Blanc, made entirely from estate Chardonnay and produced Méthode Champenoise — meaning the same traditional, bottle-fermented method used in Champagne, with that second fermentation happening right in the bottle. As a refresher, only wine from the actual Champagne region in France can legally be called “Champagne,” so producers elsewhere who use the same technique label it Méthode Champenoise or “traditional method” instead.
This isn’t my favorite Blanc de Blancs I’ve ever had, but it was exactly right for the moment — a fun, easy bottle to pop on a porch with my sister who barely drinks wine but loves anything with bubbles (we’re clearly related).
So, what is a “Blanc de Blancs,” anyway?
My sister asked me this exact question as we were sipping, so let’s cover it. “Blanc de Blancs” is French for “white from whites,” and it refers to a sparkling wine made entirely from white grapes. In Champagne, that almost always means 100% Chardonnay, since it’s the only white grape widely planted there. The flip side is “Blanc de Noirs” — “white from blacks” — a sparkling wine made from black-skinned grapes like Pinot Noir or Pinot Meunier. Since the juice itself is clear, you can still end up with a white or pale-gold wine even though the grapes are red.
Outside Champagne, the term travels with the style: any time you see “Blanc de Blancs” on a label, it’s telling you the wine was made exclusively from white grapes, usually with Chardonnay. It’s a good clue for what to expect in the glass — generally leaner, more citrus- and mineral-driven, and a touch more linear than a blend.
What I’d Pair It With
We loved this wine with the resort's house-made focaccia and baked brie, topped with local cinnamon honey and sage. Also surprisingly great: Blanc de Blancs and plain sea-salt potato chips or french fries!
This also loops back to this week’s lesson — if you’ve got a pot of creamy soup on the stove, a bottle of Blanc de Blancs is the move. The acidity and bubbles will cut right through it.
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