How to Go About Choosing the Perfect Wine for a Dinner Party

Hosting a dinner party is a big deal. Dinner hosts have gone on to have careers in the catering industry just because some guests were impressed by a dinner party they attended. There are many parts to making dinner parties successful. You have to make sure the room has the right ambience. It should be aesthetically pleasing. The main course, dessert, and appetizers must be planned out, and lastly, the wine. What’s a dinner party without wine? A whining party. Not sure how to choose? Here are tips to help you plan a great dinner party.

Play it Safe

Being creative with your wine selection is not always welcome. The safest bet sometimes is to go simple and play it safe with a choice of sparkling wine or a rosé. Both are versatile in terms of food pairings. Purchasing both is also easy. Most online food delivery services will have either handy. Wine selling stores such as Drinksupermarket also almost always have these wines in stock. There are other wine stores you can check, and checking out UK ReviewsBird can aid you in picking out a store to get these and more.

Guest Profiling

Before settling on a choice for what wine you’d be serving at your dinner party, you should try to figure out how experienced your guests are with wine. Are they vastly experienced and knowledgeable about wines, or newbies who won’t know the difference between a Pinot Noir and a Sangiovese?

Being able to answer those questions would either free you from the burden of going out of your way to provide wine for the party or putting you under pressure to deliver an incredible experience. Those new to wine might not be able to taste the difference between a wine bottle that costs a thousand pounds, and one that goes for a hundred. With a guest list of people with little to no experience of wines, you could be under less pressure. If, however, your guest list has wine lovers who can tell the difference between different types of wine just by catching a whiff of them, you would have to make more effort trying to please them. There are wine lovers with so much experience that they can differentiate by vineyard or even region. Since they’ve been to more wine-serving events, they’ll also be able to tell the difference between an excellent food pairing and a terrible one which would give away your inexperience.

Research

Why make a guess? If you’ve profiled your guests correctly and possess an idea of how experienced they are with wine, you can proceed to find out their wine preferences. This would help you narrow in on what type of wine they might like to have at the party.

Find out if they prefer red wine to white wine or have a bias for a certain varietal. If you find out the responses from your guests are widely varying, you should select two bottles or more (depending on your financial buoyancy) to cover a broad spectrum of choices. If, and this is an example, you find your guests favour red wine and white wine fairly equally, choosing a popular white wine and red wine is a spectrum-covering choice.

Go with the Popular

Imposing your choice on others in any situation is not the most brilliant of ideas. You might have a wine bottle you are in love with and would love for your guests to try out. It may end up not being a popular choice with them and could ruin the other things you’ve put right to make the party a success. It is best to pick a highly popular wine and just go with it. For example, if your guest list is made up of Italian wine lovers, going with Sangiovese might be a generally accepted choice. Each guest or a group of your guests might have a favourite wine bottle, but they might not hate the Sangiovese.

Same Food, Same Wine

This tip refers to food pairings. As a rule of thumb, it is difficult to go wrong pairing food and wine from the same region. There is a bit of popular advice given to newcomers in the food and wine pairing world: “if they grow in the same place, they are a good match”. For example, a Sauvignon Blanc from the region of Sancerre will go with a Crottin de Chavignol goat cheese obtained from the same place.

Choosing the perfect wine for a dinner party is challenging. The wine you end up going with can change people’s opinions about you. Following these tips to make an excellent choice could save you a lot of trouble, and help you plan a great dinner party.