What Wine Goes With Grilled Vegetables?

A dry Provence rosé, or a red with ripe fruit and almost no tannin — Grenache, Barbera or Pinot Noir. Whichever you choose, serve it cool.

Char is bitter, and bitterness is the taste we are tuned most finely to: quinine registers at around 8 micromoles per litre, while sucrose has to reach roughly ten millimoles — well over a thousand times the concentration — before you notice it is there. It is also additive: a bitter mouthful of food does not cancel bitterness in the glass, it doubles it. Tannin is the drying, faintly bitter grip in red wine, so a firmly tannic bottle beside a blackened aubergine hands you two lots of bitterness in the same mouthful.

The grill cuts both ways

Char is only half of what the fire does. The other half is sweetness. Browning and caramelisation turn the sugars in the vegetables into something markedly sweeter than the raw article — a blistered red pepper is a different food from the one that went on the grate.

So the brief is quite precise. Low tannin, to stay out of the way of the char. Ripe fruit, to meet the caramelised edges. And enough acidity to keep the whole thing from turning heavy under all that olive oil.

Four bottles that fit the brief

• Dry Provence rosé — usually built on Grenache, Cinsault and Syrah, and pale for a reason worth knowing: the juice is either pressed straight off the skins with no maceration at all, or given a short cold soak that the region's own trade body puts at 2 to 20 hours. Neither is anywhere near long enough to pick up tannin. Reliable enough across Provence to be the safe choice for a mixed platter.
• Grenache — soft, warm and low in tannin, with a ripe strawberry fruitiness that meets the sweet charred edges head-on. My first choice whenever peppers dominate.
• Barbera — very high acidity, low tannin, dark cherry fruit, and the wine Piedmont actually drinks midweek while the Nebbiolo is put away. Barbera d'Asti has been a DOCG since 2008 and must be at least 90% Barbera. Best value on the list.
• Pinot Noir — the earthy option, and the one to reach for when mushrooms or aubergine are doing the heavy lifting.

Courgette, pepper, aubergine: three different jobs

Courgette is watery and mild even after a hard grilling, and there is very little there for a red to hold on to. Rosé, every time.

Peppers become genuinely sweet once the skin blisters and lifts, and that sweetness is what Grenache is for.

Aubergine drinks oil, goes silky and takes on more smoke than anything else on the grill — the meatiest thing on a vegetarian barbecue and the one that justifies a red. Worth knowing: the flesh is a sponge of air pockets that collapse under heat and drink up whatever fat is going, so a grilled aubergine is carrying far more olive oil than it looks like it is. That, as much as the smoke, is why it wants acidity in the glass rather than weight.

Where it goes wrong

A young, tannic Cabernet Sauvignon. This is the standard barbecue reflex and it is the standard mistake. There is no fat here to soften the tannin the way a steak would, and the char sharpens it further.

A heavily oaked Chardonnay. The toast in the oak doubles down on the smoke, and there is rarely enough acidity underneath to lift all that olive oil.

One more thing decides the pairing more often than the vegetables do: whatever you finish the plate with. Balsamic glaze pushes you towards more acidity, crumbled feta towards the rosé, harissa or smoked paprika towards Grenache. And serve the red cool — 12 to 14°C (54 to 57°F), which for most kitchens means twenty minutes in the fridge. Our serving temperature guide gives the band for every other style.