Finding wines that pair well with your styles of pizza

Eighty-four percent of U.S. wine drinkers say pizza is their favorite food, according to a study commissioned by Francis Ford Coppola Winery, so it’s no surprise that Coppola Senior Winemaker Andrea Card has given a lot of thought to what makes wine pair well with pizza.

“The qualities of wine would be how rich it is – or how bright it is – really looking at the acidity of the wine versus the strength of the wine. All of those actually pair well with pizza; it just depends on what type of pizza,” says Card, who serves as emcee at the Coppola Perfect Your Pizza Contest, now in its fourth year. Contestants are judged on, among other things, how well their pizzas pair with wines, which they select from Coppola’s Diamond Collection.

Ricky Webster, who won the 2024 competition, created a Sicilian-style Caponata pizza with thick, focaccia-like crust topped with diced eggplant, baby Roma tomatoes, Castelvetrano olives, golden raisins, burrata and whole-milk mozzarella, finished with grated Parmesan, fried capers and fresh basil.

Card says Webster chose to pair his award-winning pie with a rosé of Pinot Noir. “The lightness and brightness and the fruit of the rosé really lightens up the pizza,” which was on the heavier side, creating “a beautiful little integration of flavors,” she says.

Other finalists included a late-summer peach pizza paired with Sauvignon Blanc, a broccoli rabe and porchetta pizza paired with Pinot Grigio and a crispy soppressata and fig pizza paired with Prosecco rosé.

“Depending on what you put on top of that pizza, it’s going to make a difference. It’s not necessarily based just on the thickness of the crust. It’s really the toppings and the flavors that are happening with it,” Card tells Pizza Today.

Notes from a Long Wine List

Mike Fadem, owner and kitchen manager at Brooklyn-based pizzeria Ops, says he has a wine problem – meaning he loves adding to his wine list, which he estimates at around 300 bottles.

A couple of years after opening Ops, an adjacent basement area became available, and Fadem uses the area for wine storage and dough fermentation. “We try to keep it between 60 and 65 F, and that gives us a really nice, steady fermentation,” Fadem says. (See “Play It Cool” for details about proper beverage-serving temperatures.)

In recent years, Fadem has embraced orange wines made in Italy, saying “They go really well with food; they’re very gastronomic and interesting, and our staff likes it a lot, which we’re focused on here.” Ops also is focused on natural wines, and he explains that using macerated skins during the winemaking process both adds the “orange” color and also helps protect the wine so that winemakers don’t have to use preservatives such as sulfites.

As for his favorite wine to pair with pizza, Fadem says, “We’ve gotten really into a set of red wines that are really light and easy to drink with a little chill on them. And our clientele definitely is drawn to those. It’s like the wine counterpart to beer, which is obviously a great combination: beer and pizza.”

Some of the red wines Ops serves chilled include fruit-forward Barbera, sourced from Piedmont region of Italy, as well as dark and earthy Aglianico, grown outside Naples. He says the dry Italian white wine Cortese typically comes from the Gavi region in Piedmont, and he enjoys pairing it with a cheesy, white pizza topped with cooked vegetables.

Fadem believes spicier, rustic white wines from the RhôneValley – such as Grenache Blanc, Roussanne and Viognier – can be “dynamic” combinations with pizza.

Operating out of New York, Fadem says the options for imported European wines are vast – and not as expensive as if he was having them shipped to the Midwest or West Coast. Additionally, he enjoys hosting winemakers to speak with staff and customers every couple of months. “We don’t make people pay or have prix fixes or anything like that. We’ll offer their wines by the glass for the night, and the winemaker can talk to everybody that’s tasting the wines. It’s very fun.”

Winemaker Recs

Card’s favorite pizza pairing is a Sauvignon Blanc with the peach pizza at Rosso, a Neapolitan, wood-fired pizzeria in Santa Rosa, California. “It’s olive oil, a little cheese, slices of peach and arugula. The freshness of the arugula and the sweetness of the peach goes so nicely with all sorts of different styles of Sauvignon Blanc,” a crisp white that she says can contain both tropical fruit and stone fruit flavors. “Then you can also have the grass-driven Sauvignon Blanc, more New Zealand style. But the peach with the sweetness can be balanced with the tartness of Sauvignon Blanc.”

She says California-style buttery Chardonnay would be a natural pairing for a savory, creamy white pizza, while Prosecco is a great palate cleanser with a bright acidity that helps cut the heaviness of some denser pies.

“Pizza is inherently a wine-friendly food,” Card says. “There’s some beautiful Italian wines that go with pizza, obviously, because that is their home.” Specifically, she points to Chianti, the traditional Italian pizza wine, as well as Sangiovese, which she calls a medium-bodied, more acid-driven wine.

Both Card and Fadem agreed that many consumers will select their favorite wine off the menu, regardless of whether it is considered a good pairing with their food selection. “Some of the wines I don’t necessarily recommend with pizza, but there’s a lot of people that just like to drink the same wines all the time, and so we want to have something for them,” Fadem says.

Kate Lavin is Senior Editor at Pizza Today.