How To Host A Wine Party

Wine doesn’t have to be intimidating.  Even better, learning about wine doesn’t have to be expensive.  To prove both of these, I decided to devote this month’s column to showing you how you can arrange and throw your very own wine-tasting party.

It’s true that you have to try a lot of wines to learn a lot about wine.  One way to try a lot of wines is to buy a lot of wines.  Another is to travel to various wine regions and visit the wineries where you can sample multiple wines at one time.  But both of these methods are expensive, and, unless you are taking good notes, it can get very confusing very quickly. A great way to avoid all that cost and confusion is to organize a wine-tasting party.

  It’s even better if you can make it a BYOB party.  The most important thing to throwing the party is choosing a theme.  I recommend one of several options:

1.         Choose a varietal.  This means choose a wine made from a specific variety of grape and then have 4-6 different wines made of that type of grape. For example, you could choose as your varietal a white such as chardonnay, sauvignon blanc or Riesling. Or you could choose a red such as cabernet sauvignon, merlot or syrah (also known as Shiraz).  Ask each of your guests to bring a bottle of the chosen varietal from a different country or state (you might need to assign specific regions to specific individuals to avoid duplication).  By comparing the flavors, you can get a sense for how the same grape makes very different wines depending upon where it is grown.  For instance, if you choose Riesling, you could have wines from Germany, France, California, Australia, Canada, Oregon and Washington.  A similar idea is to ask that all the wines from the chosen varietal be from the same region (for example, Oregon) but specify that the wines must come from different winemakers (again, you might need to give specific assignments or have your guest coordinate ahead of time so you don’t get multiple bottles of the same wine).  This will give you a sense of how the winemakers’ techniques can produce very different wines from the same grapes. 

2.         Choose a region or a winery.  This means that you choose a region known for making wine and elect to sample a variety of its wines.  They can all be the same varietal, as described in No. 1 above, or they can be different varietals.  For instance, it would be relatively easy (and inexpensive) to sample several different chardonnays from Santa Barbara County (our local grocery stores carry a number of them).  If you prefer reds, try 4-5 different cabernet sauvignons from Washington.  (I also recommend sampling a number of different pinot noirs from Oregon, but at around $40 per bottle, that can get quite expensive.)

3.         Do a blind tasting.  Choose a selection of wines from the same winery and cover the labels.  It is interesting to see what people taste when they don’t know what they’re tasting.  I once hosted a wine-tasting where the guests unanimously singled out a single superior wine which turned out to have come originally from a box!  For added fun, give the tasters a list of wines they are tasting and see how many can correctly identify all (any) of them.

In addition to your theme, I strongly recommend that you serve food.  The easiest thing to do is to ask each guest to bring a dish.  They won’t all go with all of the wines, but the taste of wine can vary dramatically when you taste it with different foods.  The foods should be finger foods that are easily served so that guests remember to dine as they taste wines.  If possible, you should also provide a selection of wine’s favorite food – cheese.  Some of the friendliest cheeses for wine are also among the easiest to find:  blue cheese, cheddar cheese and parmesan.

Once you have your theme and your food, it’s time to taste the wines.  The best way is to try all of the selections side-by-side.  This means pouring a small taste of each wine in separate glasses for each taster and allowing them to sip and compare each one at his or her convenience.  If you are one of the many people, however, who don’t own that many wine glasses, it’s fine to taste the wines one at a time out of the same glasses.  The important things are to provide a spit bucket; do not rinse the glasses between wines; and make sure you serve the wines in the proper order.

The point of a wine tasting is not to drink to excess. Rather, the wines should be tasted, enjoyed and the remainder of the glass dumped into the spit bucket (the contents of which go down the drain at evening’s end.)  In this way, you can stretch out the enjoyment of a lot of wine, yet limit yourself to the equivalent of a glass or two and still drive home hours later, soberly and safely.

You can use the same glass for each of the wines, but do not rinse them between wines.  Diluting the wine with water is worse than a slight mixing of wines, especially if you serve your wines in the right order.

If you’re tasting multiple wines made from the same grape varietal, the order in which you try them doesn’t really matter.  You also should not worry about order if you’re doing a blind tasting because following the rules might clue some tasters in to what they are tasting.

If you are trying several different varietals, you should generally put them in order from lightest to heaviest.  Although it’s not always true, color is a decent rule of thumb.  That is, taste in order from the lightest colored wine to the darkest colored wine.  The general order is pinks, whites, reds, desserts. 

Once you have placed your wines in order, sample them.  Pour each taster a small amount (one ounce is usually sufficient).  Give them pencils and paper to write their impressions down.  Encourage them to go back to earlier wines after they have tasted later wines if they want to do so for comparison.  Make sure to take note of the wines you like most (and those that you dislike).  That will help you in choosing wines for yourself in the future.  One tool that I have found helpful for recording my likes and dislikes is the tasting score sheet provided by winecountrygetaways.com (click on “wine enjoyment guide,” then select “wine tasting party” and then choose “wine scoring sheets and forms”), a website that offers news and information about traveling to California’s various wine regions.