In February of this year, a good friend and I threw a fabulous wine tasting. We had 30 something in attendance and featured 4 wines paired with specialty hors d’oeuvres. I am breaking the wine party in two posts and will cover as much as I can. This post will focus more on the preparation, decoration and highlights while the next post will focus on the actual wine and food pairings. I hope you will find this useful for planning your own fabulous party!
I’ve wanted to write this post for quite a while, but couldn’t bring myself to do it. This was my first big wine tasting and took months of planning, then on the week of the party, I came down with a horrible sinus infection. The party was able to go on without me, but I missed pretty much the entire thing. It was, in a word, heartbreaking. I fully intend to throw another party next year and pray I won’t be deathly ill for the next one!! On a happier note though, my sickness didn’t put a damper on the evening as a whole. It went off without a hitch and everyone had a great time! Here are some highlights from the party as well as tips on throwing an amazing party of your own!
For starters: we did have an entrance fee of $25 per couple to help offset the cost of the wine and food. If you would rather not have guests pay, you could always ask each person to bring 2 bottles of wine and have a blind tasting party. (I’ll blog about that one later though!!) A small part of the money went to purchase these wine glasses at Ikea. I wanted to have a uniformed look to the glasses and I don’t have that many in my personal collection. Then we spray painted the foot of each glass with chalkboard paint.
I also marked each glass at the 2 ounce fill line so guests would know how much to pour themselves. The glasses made for a fun keepsake for party goers and also insured everyone was drinking out of their own glass by the end of the night!
The end product was simple and classy!
We had a photo station with these photo props from a shop on Etsy. They were in printable files, which made it so simple to send to my local print shop to have printed on quality paper. They took a while to cut out, but I knocked it out with a movie and glass (or 2!!) of wine!
The photo station was a BIG hit, especially towards the end of the night after everyone had a few glasses!
When guests arrived, they were greeted with wine glasses that each contained a menu and order of the wine and food for the night, 4 wine tasting note pages rolled and tied with twine, and a pen.
As for overall decor, we kept it pretty simple with white linens and candles at every table.
At each station, in addition to the wine and food, we also had appetizer plates, napkins, a fork (if necessary), a carafe of water, spit bucket, and crackers. The stations looked clean but elegant.
In the next post, I will go into detail about the wine and food selection and give tips on how to expertly pair items. In the meantime, check out my other posts on entertaining with wine! Hope y’all enjoyed this post; I’d love if you’d follow along with me in all my wine shenanigans and ramblings on Facebook and Pinterest. And sign up to get e-mails whenever a new post goes up!
~Happy sipping~
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