The Fond Wine Dinner Series returns this fall, with chefs Lee Styer and Jessie Prawlucki-Styer teaming up once again with The Perfect Pour LLC for three evenings that each explore a different wine region through food. The acclaimed French BYOB in Wallingford is taking guests from Greece to Pennsylvania to Spain across three separate dinners running September through November.
The Greek Wine Pairing Dinner Kicks Off the Series
The Fond Wine Dinner Series opens Wednesday, September 23 at 6:30 p.m. with Dionysius Delight: Greek Wine Pairing Dinner, an evening built around Greece’s indigenous grapes and centuries-old winemaking traditions. Guests start with a Retsina & Tonic, a riff on the classic Gin & Tonic that puts retsina front and center, before moving into a four-course menu.
Greek Gazpacho with heirloom tomatoes and oregano opens the meal, paired with Turtles Vineyard Malagousia from Florina. Shrimp Pil Pil follows, finished with Kalamata olives and rouille alongside a Santorini Assyrtiko from GWC. Lamb Kofta Kebab, served with cucumber tzatziki and feta, pairs with a Naoussa Xinomavro from Hermes, before dessert closes the night with Melopita — Greek honey cheesecake with pistachios and apricots — alongside Hermes’ Mavrodaphne of Patras.
Pennsylvania and Spain Round Out the Fall Lineup
The series continues Wednesday, October 28 with a spotlight on Pennsylvania’s own Grace Winery, featuring a selection of the winery’s locally produced wines. Then on Wednesday, November 18, Fond turns its attention to Sherry and the Cuisine of Spain, building a menu rooted in Spanish flavors around sherry itself. Full menu and pairing details for both evenings will be announced closer to each date.
The Wine Expert Behind the Fond Wine Dinner Series
The Perfect Pour behind these pairings is Arindam Basu, a Philadelphia wine educator whose path to the industry started about as far from wine as possible. Trained as a molecular biologist with a PhD in Molecular Biochemistry, Basu discovered his passion for wine while teaching Anatomy & Physiology at Penn State, a detour that eventually led him to earn his Diploma in Wines from WSET.
Since then, Basu has built real Philadelphia roots in the wine world, working at Penns Woods Winery, teaching classes at Cooperage Whiskey Bar, and serving as a sommelier at City Winery Philadelphia before founding Perfect Pour Experience LLC. He now holds certifications including CSW, CSWS, and WSET Level 1 Sake, and teaches WSET courses for PhillyWine LLC alongside his work at Total Wine & More.
Basu is also, by his own account, a devoted explorer of Philadelphia’s BYOB scene — which makes his partnership with Fond feel less like a vendor relationship and more like a genuine collaboration between two people equally obsessed with getting the pairing exactly right.
A Fond Wine Dinner Series Worth Booking Early
This isn’t Fond’s first run through this format. The restaurant’s Oregon Pinot dinner earlier this year helped establish the Perfect Pour partnership behind this fall’s series, following in the footsteps of prior events like a 2017 Bordeaux vintage pairing dinner that showed just how far Fond is willing to go to build an evening around a single region or vintage.
Each event of the Fond Wine Dinner Series is priced at $125 per person, with seating extremely limited and reservations available through Resy. There’s something genuinely appetizing about a series built this deliberately — retsina poured alongside gazpacho, a Naoussa red standing up to lamb kofta, honey cheesecake closing things out with Mavrodaphne — the kind of pairing dinner where every course feels like it was chosen on purpose, not assembled to fill a menu.
With Pennsylvania and Spain still to come this fall, this is the kind of evening worth reserving well before the seats disappear.
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