The Focacceria x Wine Cask Whiskies | Belfast Whiskey Week 2025

Name: Belfast Whiskey Week 2026
Start: 2026-07-24
End: 2026-08-01
Location: Belfast

Filed: 15 Jul 2025
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 4 min
Ref: BWW/25/460

There are few things more satisfying in this city than discovering that the best seat in the house is somewhere nobody thought to look. On a bright July afternoon in 2025, Belfast Whiskey Week brought together the pleasures of the table and the cask at The Focacceria — a restaurant perched, improbably and magnificently, above an industrial furniture showroom on the Boucher Road. Session 1 of their BWW2025 collaboration turned its attention to wine-finished whiskies, pairing them with the kind of honest, abundant food that makes you slow down and pay attention.

About This Event

Good food and good whiskey go hand in hand, but being able to pair the best produce with the best spirits is not easy; but Focacceria make it look simple. This trendy, highly recommended and equally mysterious eatery is in an unusual location and most certainly a hidden gem – unless you are looking for some furniture, you might never stumble across it.

Based on the top floor of an Industrial furniture showroom on the Boucher Rd, Focacceria is championing the idea; that if you want great food, you’ll find it, even if it’s not in the most conventional of locations! Who would have put the great smell of bread and picking out your new sofa as the next best food experience in Belfast? It’s up there! This venue is random – We love it!

We are delighted to collaborate with Focacceria with 2 distinct tastings. Both will show off Ciaran’s amazing talent and his passion for great bread, sublime chips, wholesome food and his perfect hospitality.

This tasting will focus on whiskies that have been matured or finished in Wine Casks.

Expect exceptional food and equally exceptional whiskey.

Looking Back

Let's be honest about the location for a moment: if someone told you to head to a furniture showroom on the Boucher Road for one of the finest food and whiskey experiences of the festival year, you might raise an eyebrow. You'd be wrong to. The Focacceria sits on the top floor of that showroom like a very well-kept secret, and on 19th July 2025, it felt less like a restaurant and more like being invited into someone's home — somewhere warm, unhurried, and quietly confident in what it was doing. That confidence belongs mostly to Ciarán, whose mastery of bread, of simple ingredients coaxed into something memorable, and of genuine hospitality set the tone from the moment guests arrived.

The focus of the afternoon was wine-finished whiskies — a category that rewards curiosity. These are spirits that have spent part of their maturation, or a finishing period, in casks that previously held wine: Sauternes, Burgundy, port, sherry, Madeira, and beyond. The results can range from delicate and floral to richly layered and vinous, and the session drew on that full spectrum. Paired alongside Ciarán's food — the bread alone was worth the price of admission, and the chips are the kind you find yourself thinking about a week later — the whiskies found a context that elevated both the glass and the plate. Sweetness in a wine-finished malt found its match in something savoury and yielding; a drier, more tannic finish was softened by the warmth of good bread and good company.

What made this tasting work was the absence of pretension. Belfast Whiskey Week has always believed that uisce beatha is for everyone, and events like this one make that case without needing to argue it. The setting was unusual enough to feel like an adventure, the food was grounded and generous, and the whiskies — whatever the distilleries behind them — were presented with enough context to inform without overwhelming. Guests left knowing more than they arrived with, and with full stomachs, which is arguably the more important thing. For those who caught The Focacceria's Session 2: Grain to Glass, the contrast between that exploration of production and this one's focus on cask influence made for a genuinely complementary pair of afternoons.

The Focacceria is the kind of place that thrives on being slightly off the beaten path — it is an Italian restaurant rooted in Mediterranean simplicity, but it carries a distinctly Belfast spirit: generous, unpretentious, and better than it needs to be. BWW2025 was richer for having it involved. If the wine-finished whiskies were the headline, Ciarán's kitchen was an equal billing, and together they made the case that food and whiskey pairing, done with real care, is something more than a novelty. It's a conversation. And this was a good one. Those keen to explore more of the week's food-led events might also look back on the Crooked Mile Tattoo x Jameson Neighbourhood Café Takeover or the irresistible Bourbon & Cream session for a sense of how broadly Belfast Whiskey Week interpreted the idea of hospitality in 2025.

Sláinte to The Focacceria, to Ciarán, and to everyone who took a chance on a furniture showroom on a Saturday afternoon and found something genuinely special waiting for them upstairs.