Let’s mix up the dinner party format with a friendly competition… host a wine tasting competition! Full disclosure… it’s a fair amount of planning and work, but the end result is fun and festive!
The Overview
Every pair or individual submits their wine entry in the form of 2-3 bottles, based on the guidelines you as the host determine. The quantity depends on the number of guests, as you’ll need enough wine for everyone to taste plus one extra bottle. The extra bottles are the winner(s) prizes. So if there are ten wine entries and your wine wins, you take home ten bottles of wine!
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How it’s Structured
First things first.. decide on your guest list. Our invitation wasn’t fancy– just a simple text. This is how our invitation looked:
Each guest or couple submits their wine entry with 2-3 bottles of the same wine based on the guidelines the host provides. The number of bottles needed depends on the number of people attending. You’ll want to plan for each guest to taste 1.5 ounces of wine. You’ll need enough wine for tasting plus the one bottle to set aside. Because we had 25 guests, every single or pair had to bring three bottles. For our party, we assigned red or white to each guest and requested the normal price to be between $18 and $25. We also asked that the wine be available locally so participants could purchase the wines they liked.
The last time we hosted this type of party, we assigned a specific varietal, but this time we thought it would be fun to have guests submit whatever varietal they preferred.
You can use any price range you’re comfortable with of course, but because we knew our group included many who enjoy wine but aren’t necessarily wine enthusiasts, we thought asking people to spend up to $75 was a manageable, not-too-excessive cap.
Get the Wine in Advance
If you can coordinate a pick up/drop off of each wine in advance, it will make your life easier. You’ll need to bag and number each bottle of wine, plus you’ll want to create a list of each wine and the corresponding number so guests can take it home with them. You’ll also want to make sure whites are chilled and all wines are opened when guests arrive. We had to open 28 bottles of wine and that takes some time!
We used red bags for red wine and white bags for white wine.
Glasses
Everyone should have their own glass and use it throughout the tasting, unless you have a huge supply of glasses! We added a wine charm to each glass with the guest’s name on it. We also used a Sharpie to mark 1.5 ounces on each glass for two reasons… first, we wanted to make sure there was enough wine for everyone to taste each one; second, we wanted to give guests an idea of how much they were potentially consuming. In our case, if a guest drank 1.5 ounces of each wine, that would be the equivalent of 3.5 glasses.
We also provided wine spittoons for dumping wine and water for rinsing glasses. This was a fairly responsible group– I had to empty the spittoons because they were full!
Scoring
Scorecards printed on a heavy stock are helpful because guests are carrying them around and writing on them as they score each wine. We scored each wine on a scale of 1-10.
We provided little pencils with the scorecards:
Food
We felt like it was important to have plenty of food when tasting so many wines. Because we began the party at 7pm, it was prime eating time. Our menu consisted of meat/cheese charcuterie, beef tenderloin/pork tenderloin with accompanying breads/spreads, charcuterie, pear carpaccio, citrus salad boats, whipped ricotta toast, roasted carrots and cauliflower, crispy artichoke hearts and orange olive oil cake bites. A sampling:
Beverages Besides Wine
Guests were arriving from 7:00-7:30 and we were finalizing a few things to begin the tasting at 7:30. During this time, people drank water, beer, tequila, vodka and bourbon.
Once we began the tasting, guests had two hours to taste all fourteen wines. Some tasted them all in less than 30 minutes and some took the full two hours. Once completed, we tallied the results in an Excel spreadsheet, which took approximately 30 minutes.
My advice would be to have lots of water; thankfully most drank water throughout the evening. Once guests were done with the wine tasting, some continued to sample wine while others enjoyed bourbon, tequila and beer.
The Winners
A chardonnay won the white category, which surprised me because I didn’t think many people liked chardonnay! An Israeli kosher wine won the red category and both winners won by a significant margin. The winners split the fourteen bottles between them.
It was fun, a great way to socialize and get to know others, plus an unique opportunity to learn about wine! So fun to receive texts like these the next day!
