A wine tasting party, in addition to being great fun, is a great way for you and your friends to learn about the incredibly varied world of wine.
Must have:
- Glasses – one per person is sufficient so long as you provide water to rinse glasses out in between wines.
- Paper bags – we highly recommend enclosing the wine in a brown paper bag, or obscuring the label in some other way to create a blind tasting. Blind tastings increase your focus on the wine, and remove any and all preconceptions about a given bottle. (If you’re afraid of cheaters, remove the foils and hide the corks.)
- Food – mild cheeses (stronger is ok for fuller bodied reds, or sweet wines), crackers, good bread and fruit are all great additions to a tasting, and fruit and dessert are a great way to end a tasting with a nice cup of coffee.
- Pencils and paper – by writing down your impressions of each wine you promote greater focus and patience in examining a wine’s merits as well as its faults.
- Water – it is always nice to have water (not too cold) available, in addition to food, for people to cleanse their palates
- Spit buckets – for tasters who do not wish to swallow, and to dispose of excess wine before moving on to the next.
- White – whether it’s a tablecloth, napkins, or white paper, having something white is essential to act as a background for observing a wine’s color.
Then, of course, there is the wine…
There are endless options when considering how to theme your tasting. Here are a few of our favorites:
- Same grape variety, different regions – a great way to compare a grape variety as it is created in different regions or countries for instance a Cabernet Sauvignon tasting could include red Bordeaux from the Left Bank, and varietal Cabernet Sauvignon from the Languedoc, Chile, Australia and California. If you want to really delve into the regional differences, decrease the number of regions thereby increasing the number of bottles from each region, for instance a Chardonnay tasting where you compare 4 white Burgundy with 4 California Chardonnays.
- One geographic area – highlighting the regional characteristics of a wine region can be sweeping, like great Italian wines, or very specific, like white wines of the Loire Valley.
- One winery - even more precise are tastings involving one winery, these can be horizontal tastings where you taste all or several of a winery’s wines, or vertical where you taste one wine in different vintages.
No matter what theme you are thinking of choosing, the key is to pick wines that you and your guests will like, and to have fun.
If you have never hosted a tasting before, a six wine tasting is a good way to start – more wines tend to tire out the palate. As your experience grows so can your flights. Here are some of our collections (6 to 12 unique wines) that would make good tastings. You can also browse by wine type, country or region to build your own tasting.
