Ran my first wine party

[TheEngineer]

Actually, it was pretty simple.

I knew that I wanted between 8-10 wines for the tasting and I have some friends who are very experienced wine people and some who have never bought a bottle before in their lives.

I establish a list of varietals/types that I wanted them to bring. I separated the varietals into ten groups which went from light white to heavy white and light red to heavy red, desserts and asked them to pick one of the groups and one of varietal/type within that group (i.e. one of the groups could have been icewine, TBA, Sauternes, late harvest Rieslings and they could have picked a Sauternes to bring)

For those that are familiar with wines, they would immediately pick the ones they liked and for those that did not, at least this would give them some structure and they would not be overwhelmed when they went into a store. No real pricing was set so we got a good representation of wines from most reasonable pricing categories. A prize was set for the best wine and best QPR wine, though that ended up being one and the same.

Those that needed help were pointed in the direction of a few stores within the Boston area and were asked to speak with the staff (something that they need to get use to anyways). They then let me know what they were bringing so that I had a chance to prepare the food pairings. Only half got back to me but because I at least know what group they selected, then I had some reasonable guesses.

The party was kicked off with a wine 101 discussion for what everyone was about to embark on. What they were looking for in each wine. I prepared a scoring book for all so that they can keep track. All participants were given a couple of minutes to discuss what they brought just prior to serving. They also lead the discusson on the wine to the extent that they were comfortable. This way, it made the involvement part of the fun! All wines were scored together and discussed together.

We had a blast! We were really careful about pace and made sure that the food was part of the process. Then the wines were served with the food pairings. All people helped to cooked, or helped prepare or helped to wash even. This added some spacing between bottles and since the foods were really simple, the spacings were something like 15 minutes of blank space at the most.

So a group with varying levels of knowledge about wine all had a good time and were able to leverage the knowledge of those in the know and everyone learned something in the process.