Wine & Whiskey Pairing Part Two | Belfast Whiskey Week 2025

Some pairings feel inevitable in hindsight — and the second instalment of the Wine & Whiskey Pairing at Belfast Whiskey Week 2025 was exactly that kind of revelation. Held on the evening of 22nd July in the intimate surrounds of the Library Bar, this guided tasting brought together the expertise of Alistair Bell from the Northern Ireland Wine & Spirit Institute and a carefully curated selection of whiskies and wines with a genuine, traceable relationship to one another. At £30 a head, it was one of the festival's most quietly ambitious evenings — and one that lingered on the palate long after the last glass was set down.

Filed: 15 Jul 2025
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 3 min
Ref: BWW/25/220

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

The premise of the Wine & Whiskey Pairing series has always been a little more demanding than your typical festival dram. Rather than simply presenting fine whiskies side by side, this event asked attendees to do something genuinely worthwhile: slow down, pay attention, and follow the thread from vine to cask to glass. Alistair Bell, whose knowledge through the Northern Ireland Wine & Spirit Institute runs both broad and deep, guided the room through a tasting designed not to show off, but to illuminate. There was a duchas to the whole thing — a rootedness, a sense that understanding where flavour comes from matters as much as enjoying it.

Part Two, by design, offered a different set of wines and whiskies from its companion session, Wine & Whiskey Pairing: Part One — European Delights, ensuring that guests who attended both evenings were rewarded with a genuinely distinct experience rather than a rehash. The whiskies on the table here each owed something of their character to wine cask finishing or maturation — whether that was a flush of red fruit from a Bordeaux barrel, the honeyed weight of Sauternes influence, or the tannic backbone that only time in ex-Burgundy wood can bring. The wines chosen to accompany them weren't decorative; they were instructive. Pour the wine, nose the whiskey, and suddenly the seanchas of the spirit opened up.

What made the evening work was the absence of pretension. Bell has a gift for making the science of cask interaction feel less like a lecture and more like a conversation over a good table — the kind you might have in a sheugh-side farmhouse if that farmhouse happened to have an exceptional cellar. Questions were welcomed, opinions were offered back, and more than a few attendees admitted afterwards that they'd fundamentally revised how they thought about wine-finished whiskey. Not as a novelty or a marketing exercise, but as a genuine dialogue between two of Europe's great fermented traditions.

The Library Bar itself proved a worthy host. Intimate enough to feel like a private gathering, it gave the tasting a focus that larger venues can't always provide. The food element — complimentary and well-judged — added another dimension without ever threatening to overshadow the glasses in front of you. Sláinte to the team who put the evening together. If you're curious about the kind of experimental spirit that ran through other parts of the festival programme, the Killowen: Weird & Wonderful Tasting offered its own take on pushing whiskey's boundaries — well worth a read. And if adventure was your compass for BWW2025, don't overlook the Smuggler sessions, which brought a very different kind of story to the festival floor.

The Wine & Whiskey Pairing has earned its status as a festival staple, and Part Two in 2025 showed exactly why. It is the kind of event that respects its audience — treating curiosity as the price of entry and rewarding it generously. The uisce beatha and the vine have more to say to each other than most of us ever stop long enough to hear. On this particular July evening in Belfast, a room full of people stopped and listened.