To wine and dine someone is to treat them to a good meal with plenty to drink, usually at some expense and often with a purpose beyond simple hospitality. Companies wine and dine clients they want to keep sweet, and the phrase carries a faint suggestion of persuasion or flattery alongside the generosity. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it plainly as entertaining someone with food and drink, especially expensive food and drink, and that captures how the expression is used today, whether the entertaining is genuinely warm or a calculated piece of business courtship.
What’s the origin of the phrase ‘wine and dine’?
The phrase is almost entirely literal rather than figurative. As the reference site vocabulary.com puts it, “the phrase’s meaning is fairly obvious, since when you wine and dine, you provide someone with wine to drink and food on which to dine.” There is no hidden story behind the words, only the pairing of two verbs describing what actually happens at the table.
Its age as a set expression is harder to pin down with confidence. Christine Ammer’s American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms dates the colloquial phrase to the mid-1800s, defining it as meaning to “entertain someone or treat someone to a fine meal,” and Dictionary.com repeats this dating, citing the same idiom dictionary entry. If correct, that would place the phrase’s rise as an idiom, rather than just a description of a meal, in the Victorian period, alongside the broader growth of formal business and social entertaining.
Not everyone agrees on that timeline. The phrase-reference site Ginger Software states instead that the origin is not known and treats “wine and dine” as a phrase that only became current in the twentieth century. Given this disagreement between sources, the honest position is that the phrase’s exact age is uncertain, with one dating putting its emergence in the mid-1800s and another placing it a century later. What is consistent across all accounts is the meaning: providing someone with food and drink, generally good quality, and generally with an eye to the effect it will have on them.