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Twelfth Night Wine Pairings
Staunton Wine Bar Adds
Character
To its Wine Tastings
We'll start with a riddle. If a 2024 Maison Hauts Baigneux Le Chenin wine, with notes of baked and fresh fruit and minerality, were a character in A Midsummer Night's Dream, who would that character be? Answer to come below.
The Prosciutto Melt at Accordia, a wine bistro in Staunton, Virginia, is an incredible sandwich. You might want to pair it with Maria's wine—Maria as in the waiting-gentlewoman in William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Orsino's wine will work with the menu's Croque Monsieur featuring ham, gruyere, bechamel sauce, and thyme on rustic panini bread. Sir Andrew Aguecheek? His wine is just right for the Chakalaka Tapas, . Another dining and wining option is just have eight of the play's characters on hand as you work through the Charcuterie Board.
Photo by Eric Minton, Shakespeaeances.com
This past winter, the Accordia began offering a Twelfth Night version of its weekly wine tasting menus in tandem with the play's production at the American Shakespear Center's Blackfriars Playhouse around the corner. The eight wines on that week's menu were paired with specific characters from the play based on the wine's nose and palate or, sometimes, the name. The Shakespearean-flavored wine tasting menus became a hit, with even some of the actors in the production showing up to drink their stage selves.
The idea started with Jess Snellings, Accordia's front-of-house shift lead, who has been with the wine bar since August 2023. "I've dabbled with Shakespeare wine-character pairings previously, but this is the first time I've done the deep dive into it: written out and printed the notes, and it's been advertised," she said. "So, in a sense, Twelfth Night is my 'debut,' if you will."
Advertised as in a signboard on the Beverly Street sidewalk, Staunton's main downtown drag, that I encountered on my way to visiting friends one February Friday afternoon right after I got into town. I popped in to learn more and canceled my dinner plans for that evening so that I could dine and, more importantly, drink with Olivia, Viola, Feste, and even Malvolio, a 2023 French Domaine Gavoty Grand Classique. "This wine boasts pear, citrus, and peach on the nose, and white peach on the finish," is how Snellings' tasting notes describe the Gavoty. "However, it also has a slightly saline texture and notes of wild herbs on the palate. Who do we know from Twelfth Night that has a salty side? That's right, our Puritan friend, Malvolio." Furthermore, she writes, "like the herb notes, Malvolio may not be completely belligerent, though he is certainly pugnacious."
Snellings doesn't select the wines. Owners Robert and Angela Higgs build the week's wine tasting list. Snellings then finds the most suitable matchings of wines to characters. It's not always easy coming up with a suitable match, and Snellings will do some thematic stretching. The previous week's Orsino was a 2022 La Lupinella "mostly Sangiovese" from Tuscany, which is light with notes of bright fruits, "ideal for a picnic-date for wooing a crush. If only Orsino's crush would give him the time of day." This week's Orsino is more thematically apt, the nearby Muse Vineyards' 2022 Urania. Snellings says she knew she had hit on the right wine to assign to Orsino when she learned that Urania is the Greek muse of astronomy and astrology, the heavens and stars. Says her tasting notes: "If anyone is going to call on a Muse (especially one associated with the stars and heavens), it's Orsino. Urania's notes of black cherry are reminiscent of Orsino's dark brooding, particularly at the top of the play. Unlike Orsino, though, Urania is smooth. The wine's bouquet of cedar and forest floor and its earthy notes of blackberry bramble and dark fruit seem fitting for someone who goes on the occasional hunt."
Other times, pairings are immediately obvious, such as the previous week's pairing of Maria with a 2023 Vignamato "Violette" Lacrima di Morro d'Alba. Wouldn't this be Viola's wine? No, decided Snellings. Its "initial bouquet is reminiscent of Fruity Pebbles, which coincides nicely with Maria's childlike behavior. The notes of violet and roses make this wine feel like a garden in a glass. As Maria teaches us, a garden is the perfect setting for a prank." Viola instead led off that week's wine tasting with a 2024 Cantina Kaltern K White 2024 from Italy, a Chardonnay–Pinot Blanc–Sauvignon Blanc blend. "Like Viola, this white blend has layers," reads Snellings tasting notes. "It balances white fruits and minerality. Viola has a lot of experience finding balance in her role in Orsino's court. This wine also feels like springtime—a time of renewal and rebirth. Maybe even some self-fashioning."
With just eight wines on the menu and 14 notable characters in Twelfth Night, that means characters come and go from week to week. Sebastian and Malvolio were absent on the previous week's list, Aguecheek and Belch were absent for the current week. Antonio was represented on both menus: like me, Snellings has a lot of respect for Antonio though he seldom gets the credit he deserves for his important role in Twelfth Night. Antonio led off the evening's tasting menu with a Hautes Côtes de Beaune, a Burgundy Chardonnay with "gentle notes of oak and a slight creaminess [that] harken to Antonio's gentle soul—at least the one Sebastian brings out," Snellings writes. "A wine like this would be great for sipping out on the open sea, especially with the notes of green apple, citrus, and white flowers."
Snellings first encountered Shakespeare like most Americans, reading Romeo and Juliet as a freshman in high school. "I wasn't ready for it," she says. When she was an undergraduate student at Bridgewater College in Virginia, one of her theater professors required the students to attend a performance at the Blackfriars Playhouse. She and a group of fellow students attended The Two Gentlemen of Verona, "and the moment Proteus and Valentine entered the stage, everything changed for me. Suddenly, Shakespeare's works came to life. And I thought, I don't know how, but this is what I want to do for the rest of my life."
She entered a two-degree program at Mary Baldwin University which is up the hill from Beverly Street and partners with the American Shakespeare Center on its Shakespeare and Performance Studies graduate program. Snellings received a master of fine arts from that program a year after earning her master of letters. She worked the 2022 summer/fall season at the Blackfriars as a stage management fellow and returned in that role in the 2025 spring season. She also was project manager for the American Shakespeare Center's training program for American Sign Language interpreters working with early modern drama, i.e. productions of Shakespeare plays and those of his contemporaries. "The language is so different from contemporary drama, so prep is also different," Snellings says.
Her two theses hint at her path to pairing characters with wine. Her MLitt thesis was "'Hie Thee Hence': Banishment's Effects on Identity and its Role in Defining Englishness in Early Modern Drama," which focused on Richard II, specifically the title character, his queen, Bolingbroke, and Mowbray. The title of her MFA thesis was "Entering his Villain Era: How Discourse Around Disability Shapes the Character of Richard, Duke of Gloucestesr, in 3 Henry VI," the man who would become the titular character in Shakespeare's subsequent play, Richard III. "I have a fascination with identity in Shakespeare's plays," Snellings says.
As part of the local economy fueled in no small measure by the American Shakespeare Center, "I'm thrilled to put my Shakespeare degrees to use while also supporting the company that helped me find my passion," Snellings says. She along with the owners are hoping Accordia's wine-character pairings lead to collaboration opportunities with the American Shakespeare Center. "Ultimately, I just wanted to do something fun and challenging for the new season at the Blackfriars," Snellings told me in February.
It has taken hold in the months since. She did a wine pairing menu for the American Shakespeare Center's production of Hannah Cowley's Bold Stroke for a Husband at the Blackfriars, and she's beginning to do pairings for characters in As You Like It, the playhouse's next Shakespeare production. "I have absolutely no doubt Jaques will have more than one wine paired with him over the course of the production's run," she says. Snellings also did pairings for the plays of the Constellation Shakespeare Collective's season, part of the Mary Baldwin Shakespeare and Performance program that uses the Blackfriars stage. One of the first-year students asked her to do A Midsummer Night's Dream wine pairing menu. Snellings and the student collaborated on which characters the company wanted to highlight. Though the student didn't suggest it, Snellings led off the tasting menu with the 2024 Maison Hauts Baigneux Le Chenin representing Starveling's Dog. "Shout out to the real star of Pyramus & Thisbe—Starveling's unnamed dog!" Snellings wrote in her tasting notes.
Snellings takes the formal weekly wine tasting notes menu and edits in her Shakespearean characters notes as an alternative menu. You can choose either wine tasting menu or what you will from Accordia's wide selection of wines, for all the world is the wine bistro's stage.
Eric Minton
May 28, 2026
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