When my husband and I fist got married we lived in a dinky one bedroom apartment. It was our favorite place, looking back we can’t even fathom how we ate dinner every night for a year on the couch!! We are definitely sit down and eat over good conversation type people. So when we moved to a bigger apartment and had a huge dinning room with a bar (awesome, I know) we decided we needed to come up with a great “party” night to have our friends over and host in our dinning room! That is when I came up with the idea of having a wine tasting party. I told h-dawg and he loved the idea and it took off, we have one every month with different friends and I believe we are on to party #10!
I want to share with you how we laid out our party. I did a lot of research on how was the best way to throw a wine tasting party. It was actually really fun and I learned a lot!
The Basics
1. You need to select a region or type of wine to let all your guests know what to bring. We started with a free for all, everyone just had to bring a bottle under $10 but then you get too many different flavors and it is harder to rate them.
 |
| Our first party was a free-for-all |
2. You need to decide if you want to do a blind tasting or not. We always “brown bag” the bottles of wine so it is a surprise what kind you are drinking, then we can vote on our favorites. This adds another fun element to the tasting.
3. You need some sort of guide for you guests to follow. I found a tasting guide (
here) but there are a bunch to choose from or you could mix yours up to make your own!!
4. Last you should decide if you want to give out a prize. We always buy an extra bottle of wine for the person whose bottle ranks the highest! You never really know what your buying or if others will like it so it is just a fun lucky man incentive!
The people we invite now have been so many times I don’t remake my guides because I really am to lazy, but if you were gonna make a sweet party a guide is a must!
There are supposbly some “rules” to wine tasting, it is fun to print off a guide or read it to your guests. Some of the things really work!!
The tasting guide is a lot of fun. It helps spark conversation as well! Our first tasting guide came from Epicurous. They have a great PDF that you can download or type up yourself! They also have a few tips that are fun to follow. Although we did not pair our wine with food it is still interesting to read those tips too! Check out the guide
<Check It> Above (under #3) is a picture of our first wine guides that I made, they were really fun but took a lot of work! Below you can see a picture of what we resort to now haha pure laziness!
I also spent a lot of time writing up definitions on note cards for more conversation starters. The definitions I got from
Basic Wine Knowledge. I basically picked which ones I thought were fun. Below a picture of my "wine knowledge cards"
Last we followed a "wine tasting guide" also from epicurious. There are supposedly 9 steps to tasting wine!
1. Introduce the Wine
2. Sample
3. Look
4. Smell
5. Sip
6. Swallow
7. Evaluate
8. More Sampling
9. Discuss
Some of the descriptions to these steps I found elsewhere were so funny! It said not to be embarrassed if you make loud noises while tasting, so I was sure to try it ;)
Below are some more fun pictures from our wine tastings! I hope you guys try it out, it introduced me and the hubs to a lot of our now favorite cheap wines!!
Feel free to share the wine tasting tips, or copy my guides, just tell everyone where you got them ;)
PS. Favorite wine thus far is the Flip Flop Chardonnay, if you see it some where you should try it!! Flip Flop brand wines have one 3 of the wine tastings!!
When my husband and I fist got married we lived in a dinky one bedroom apartment. It was our favorite place, looking back we can’t even fathom how we ate dinner every night for a year on the couch!! We are definitely sit down and eat over good conversation type people. So when we moved to a bigger apartment and had a huge dinning room with a bar (awesome, I know) we decided we needed to come up with a great “party” night to have our friends over and host in our dinning room! That is when I came up with the idea of having a wine tasting party. I told h-dawg and he loved the idea and it took off, we have one every month with different friends and I believe we are on to party #10!
I want to share with you how we laid out our party. I did a lot of research on how was the best way to throw a wine tasting party. It was actually really fun and I learned a lot!
The Basics
1. You need to select a region or type of wine to let all your guests know what to bring. We started with a free for all, everyone just had to bring a bottle under $10 but then you get too many different flavors and it is harder to rate them.
|
| Our first party was a free-for-all |
2. You need to decide if you want to do a blind tasting or not. We always “brown bag” the bottles of wine so it is a surprise what kind you are drinking, then we can vote on our favorites. This adds another fun element to the tasting.
3. You need some sort of guide for you guests to follow. I found a tasting guide (
here) but there are a bunch to choose from or you could mix yours up to make your own!!
4. Last you should decide if you want to give out a prize. We always buy an extra bottle of wine for the person whose bottle ranks the highest! You never really know what your buying or if others will like it so it is just a fun lucky man incentive!
The people we invite now have been so many times I don’t remake my guides because I really am to lazy, but if you were gonna make a sweet party a guide is a must!
There are supposbly some “rules” to wine tasting, it is fun to print off a guide or read it to your guests. Some of the things really work!!
The tasting guide is a lot of fun. It helps spark conversation as well! Our first tasting guide came from Epicurous. They have a great PDF that you can download or type up yourself! They also have a few tips that are fun to follow. Although we did not pair our wine with food it is still interesting to read those tips too! Check out the guide
<Check It> Above (under #3) is a picture of our first wine guides that I made, they were really fun but took a lot of work! Below you can see a picture of what we resort to now haha pure laziness!
I also spent a lot of time writing up definitions on note cards for more conversation starters. The definitions I got from
Basic Wine Knowledge. I basically picked which ones I thought were fun. Below a picture of my "wine knowledge cards"
Last we followed a "wine tasting guide" also from epicurious. There are supposedly 9 steps to tasting wine!
1. Introduce the Wine
2. Sample
3. Look
4. Smell
5. Sip
6. Swallow
7. Evaluate
8. More Sampling
9. Discuss
Some of the descriptions to these steps I found elsewhere were so funny! It said not to be embarrassed if you make loud noises while tasting, so I was sure to try it ;)
Below are some more fun pictures from our wine tastings! I hope you guys try it out, it introduced me and the hubs to a lot of our now favorite cheap wines!!
Feel free to share the wine tasting tips, or copy my guides, just tell everyone where you got them ;)
PS. Favorite wine thus far is the Flip Flop Chardonnay, if you see it some where you should try it!! Flip Flop brand wines have one 3 of the wine tastings!!
