KFC is opening a wine bar. Not a stunt tasting in a marketing agency’s back room, an actual wine bar, in Shoreditch, for four days over the August bank holiday. It is called Coq au Vin, tickets are £15 for a 90-minute sitting, and almost every slot sold out before the doors even opened.

I have never set foot in a KFC. I would have loved to try this one.

What is actually on the menu

The wine partner is La Vieille Ferme, the Perrin family’s Rhône-adjacent blend that sits on supermarket shelves everywhere for the price of two coffees. The pairings are exactly as blunt as they should be:

  • Sparkling rosé with popcorn chicken
  • La Vieille Ferme rouge with hot wings
  • Rosé and blanc with Original Recipe tenders and dips

La Vieille Ferme is even bringing back its “The Chicken Wine” label for the event, which is the part that makes this more than a gimmick. It did not invent that nickname. TikTok did, in 2024, because the label has a picture of chickens on it and people started drinking it with fried chicken and telling each other about it. The brand is not launching a trend here. It is finally showing up to one that its own drinkers started without permission.

The pairing is not a joke

Here is the thing that wine people sometimes miss while they are busy being amused. Fried chicken is one of the hardest things on earth to pair, and cheap Rhône-style blends are genuinely one of the best answers.

Think about what is happening in your mouth. Fried chicken is salt, fat and crunch, served hot, eaten fast, with your hands. What you need against that is acidity to cut through the fat, low or soft tannin so nothing turns metallic and drying, some fruit to stand up to the salt, and a cold serving temperature to reset your palate between bites.

A young Grenache-Cinsault blend served cool does all four. A serious tannic red does none of them. Pour a twenty-year-old classed growth next to hot wings and you will ruin two things at once: the wine gets flattened by the salt and chilli, and the chicken makes the tannins taste like a wet teabag. The £8 bottle is not the compromise here. It is the correct answer.

The sparkling rosé with popcorn chicken is the smartest one on that list. Bubbles are a scrubbing brush for fried food, which is the same reason Champagne and fish and chips has been a quiet classic for years.

Why £15 matters more than the pairing

The ticket price is the real story. Fifteen pounds, ninety minutes, no prior knowledge required, no one asking you what you get on the nose.

Think about how most people are invited into wine. A tasting costs £45, you sit in a row, someone tells you about malolactic fermentation, and you spend the whole evening quietly worried that you are going to say the wrong thing. It is an exam with spitting. Plenty of people never come back.

Then there is this. You show up for fried chicken, there is wine, the wine is part of something fun rather than the thing you are being tested on, and you leave having learned something without noticing you learned it. That is a far better entry ticket into wine than most of what the trade puts on. A good experience where wine is part of something cool beats a good lecture every single time.

The sell-out is the evidence. Nobody bought those tickets because they wanted to study the Southern Rhône. They bought them because it sounded like a laugh. And a decent number of them will walk out having discovered that wine goes with the food they actually eat, which is the single most useful thing anyone can learn about it.

What to do with this at home

You do not need a ticket. This is one of the easiest wins in wine and it costs about eight euros.

Next time there is fried chicken on the table, whether it is a bucket, a Korean takeaway or something you made yourself, open a bottle of young Southern Rhône, Côtes du Rhône, Ventoux or Luberon, and put it in the fridge for twenty minutes first. Cool, not cold. If you prefer white or pink, the same rule applies: fresh, unoaked, chilled properly.

Then notice what happens. Not what you are supposed to taste, just whether the next bite is better because of the sip. That is the whole game.

We have been saying since 2018 that wine belongs at the table people actually eat at. It is quite funny that KFC got there this month, and sold out doing it.