The Best Wine Pairing For Italian Wedding Soup

Pairing wine with food can be tricky in any scenario, especially for the average consumer with little training in culinary arts. And make no mistake: Perfect pairings are indeed an art form. The mystique digs even deeper when choosing a wine to complement a steaming bowl of soup. The wide array of flavors, textures, spices, ingredients, and temperatures involved in creating a glorious pot of bubbling soup would challenge even the most experienced vino matchmaker. That goes double if the soup happens to be the beloved Italian wedding soup. 

That's why we reached out to an expert in the field, Andrew Elder, Sommelier and Service Director for Hive Hospitality, Jônt DC, and Ômo by Jônt. As would be expected, Elder suggests reaching for a motherland selection, per the heritage of Italian wedding soup. "Of course the wine here has to be Italian," he says, "so something with notes of fresh minerality and zesty acidity like verdicchio is the first thought."

Noting that verdicchio wine is from central Italy, he further ties it to the nature of traditional Italian wedding soup. "With the usage of fresh herbs common in these styles of soup," explains Elder, "this type of wine from central Italy can accentuate the herbaceousness of the soups and also provide a unique balance with its freshness." Verdicchio largely comes from grapes grown in the Le Marche region of Italy for many centuries. As fate would have it, Italian wedding soup is also an ancient, centuries-old soup handed down for generations.

Italian wedding soup is a mainstay of Neapolitan cooking, surprisingly with very humble roots. It was traditionally considered peasant food because of the mish-mosh of ingredients, often leftover bits of meats and scavenged greens. Those are still the primary soup components, typically interpreted in American-Italian versions as meatballs with plentiful herbs, plus pasta and fresh leafy greens. It has become one of the best Italian soups to try in the fall, but easily works through all the seasons. 

In our Tasting Table version of Rustic Italian wedding soup, recipe developer Michelle McGlinn recommends making the meatballs from a mixture of ground beef and pork, seasoned with the likes of rosemary, thyme, sage, Parmesan cheese, and lemon zest. Spinach is the green of choice, accompanied by lots of acini de pepe, the classic, tiny, round pasta often used in Italian wedding soup. 

The name has little to do with actual weddings; it's instead the Italian phrase for minestra maritata, which translates as "married" or "wedded" soup." It refers to the melding, or marriage, of all the ingredients within the pot. When pairing Italian wedding soup with verdicchio wine, you might want to splash a bit of it into the broth to further seal the deal. In the end, it's all about the marvelous mix of compatible and contrasting flavors defining your belly-warming meal.