Top food & wine pairings

The best food pairings for dry (or off-dry) riesling

Posted by Fiona Beckett (Google+) on March 18 2026 at 10:26

It’s sometimes hard to predict what type of food will pair well with riesling because they’re all so different - some being bone dry, some ultra sweet, some positively floral, others zingy and citrussy.

But let’s concentrate on dry and off-dry rieslings in this post - the sort you’d have with starters and main course dishes - and focus on the sort of dishes and ingredients that tend to go with them best.

The good news is that there are a lot of them!

Good pairings with dry rieslings

Raw, cured and smoked fish

Particularly salmon and trout though any selection of smoked and/or cured fish should work well as you’ll see from this pairing for cured salmon. Also sushi, particularly with the slight touch of sugar you get in sushi rice (riesling is rarely bone dry)

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Former Guardian wine columnist Fiona Beckett is the founder of matchingfoodandwine.com, one of the web’s longest-running resources on food and wine pairing. She has spent over 30 years matching food with wine so you don’t have to ...