Wine & Whiskey Pairing Part One – 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: 3 min
Ref: BWW/25/380

Some pairings are simply meant to be, and the Wine & Whiskey Pairing evenings have long been among the most anticipated events on the Belfast Whiskey Week calendar. On the evening of 20th July 2025, the Library Bar played host to Part One: European Delights — a guided exploration of how the old world of wine and the ancient craft of uisce beatha are, in truth, more closely entwined than many a drinker might suppose.

About This Event

As a staple tasting at the Festival - our Wine and Whiskey Pairings are simply divine. We look to introduce to you the wines that help shape the whiskies, by sourcing intriguing and exceptional tasting wines that have a direct link to the whiskies we have carefully selected.

With the expertise of Alistair Bell from the Northern Ireland Wine & Spirit Institute, we will delve into the relationship between these fine wines and whiskies.

Be prepared to extend your palate and question the extent to which wine cask finishing and maturation makes the flavour profile change in these whiskies.

There are two sessions, both will have different wines and whiskies.

Looking Back

There is a quiet kind of revelation that happens when you lift a whiskey glass and find something unexpected there — a ghost of ripe Burgundy, a whisper of oxidised Sherry, the faint mineral trace of a dry Riesling. That was the territory Alistair Bell of the Northern Ireland Wine & Spirit Institute navigated with care and evident delight on this Sunday evening. Bell is a guide of rare quality: precise enough to satisfy the aficionado, warm enough to carry the curious newcomer along without them ever feeling out of their depth.

The premise of the evening was straightforward but the execution was anything but. Alistair paired carefully selected European wines directly alongside whiskies whose own characters had been shaped — through cask finishing or extended maturation — by those very wine traditions. Attendees weren't simply being shown a curiosity; they were being invited to taste the duchas of the cask itself, the inherited character that travels from vineyard to cooperage to distillery and, finally, into the glass. To drink in that sequence was to follow a long, winding road from some southern European hillside to a Belfast bar stool, and the journey was well worth making.

What made this session distinct — and what keeps the Wine & Whiskey Pairings as a staple fixture of the festival — is the insistence on genuine connection. These weren't arbitrary pairings chosen for novelty. Each wine had a direct, traceable relationship to its whiskey counterpart, and Alistair ensured that relationship was felt as much as it was explained. Palates were extended. Assumptions were quietly dismantled. More than one attendee, it is fair to say, left with a significantly more complicated opinion of what whiskey cask finishing actually means in practice. If you attended the Wine & Whiskey Pairing: Part Two later in the festival week, you would have found that the theme deepened further still, with an entirely different cast of wines and whiskies.

The Library Bar provided exactly the right atmosphere for an evening of this kind — unhurried, comfortable, with just enough of a literary hush to encourage the sort of slow, attentive drinking that a tasting like this demands. At £30 a head, with complimentary food accompanying the pours, this was among the most generous propositions of the 2025 programme. Those who prefer their whiskey a little wilder might have found their evening at the Killowen: Weird & Wonderful Tasting, where the distillery's more unconventional expressions held court — but for those drawn to craft, provenance and the seanchas of the cask, Event 36 was close to essential.

Belfast Whiskey Week has always understood that whiskey does not exist in isolation — it is a product of land, of tradition, of the vessels that have carried other liquids before it. The Wine & Whiskey Pairings embody that understanding better than almost any other event on the programme. Sláinte to Alistair Bell and to everyone who raised a glass in the Library Bar that Sunday evening. If you missed this one, keep an eye on the Whiskey Map as the festival evolves — some events are too good to remain a once-off.