Carole & Karen's Most Excellent Wine Tasting
Apr 04 '00
My friend Karen & I used to see each other about 3 times a week. We had really busy lives, but we always found time to stay in touch sometimes this was because we were nuts enough to run a committee together for this non-profit we are a part of and sometimes it was just to grab a glass of wine and catch up. But with me in crazy old high-tech marketing and Karen with a new baby, our friendship had become a massive game of telephone tag. So, we put heads together and found a project we could pull off together that involved our friends, wine, and food. This became "Carole & Karen's Most Excellent Wine Tasting".
The Place: We’re no dummies. We convinced our bachelor friend Scott to let us hold the wine tasting at his apartment since he has a ton of space. We did all the set up and clean up.
The Time/Date: We held it on a Saturday night and began the festivities at 8:00 p.m.
The Food: We had salt-free crackers and plenty of water on hand so that the diehard wine tasters could cleanse their palates between wines. For the rest of the group - both Karen and I brought some appetizers that didn’t require any time in the oven. (It’s a personal peeve of mine to have people show up at my house with something that requires oven time, when I’m busy hostessing and we didn’t want to do this to Scott.) The list of appetizers included: Carmelized onion dip with toast – a recipe from epicurious.com, Smoked Salmon with Ginger Butter on dark bread, Cheese & Cracker Platter, Fruit & Cheese Platter, Pate & Cracker Platter (brought by Vickie an Epinions Restaurant Expert), and Chocolate Fondue (a huge hit!).
The Glassware: We managed to scrounge up enough glasses between 4 people so that everyone could drink out of a glass. We just thought that plastic would be tacky and didn’t want to deal with the hassles of renting/returning.
Dress: Casual
Invitees: When Karen & I combined social lists we ended up with 96 people! We pared this down to a list of 50 and ended up with about 35 friends in total. Most of this group was made up of extroverts who did a fine job of meeting/greeting/conversing with each other.
OK – I’ve read this far – What about the wine tasting part?
We had a Plan A and a Plan B for our wine tasting and ended up going with Plan B. Here are the plans we considered:
Plan A – Hire Dave, (who works out of a local liquor store and is someone we’ve used before at other events with great success.) This crazy wine guy who drinks about as much as he serves, and tells wild stories about each of the wines. With Dave, he chooses and brings with him all the wines and sets up. He also works the room and introduces each wine before he pours it into each glass. He also stays to clean up. Dave’s flat fee is $200 and there is a charge for the wines he brings less his discount from the store. You can give him a range that you want to pay for the wines. If we went this route, we would have just had our wine tasters pay $20/person, which they said that they didn’t mind doing. Unfortunately, Dave wasn’t available on the night we wanted. Also, we would have had to commit to a number in advance so that we had enough wine. With last minute cancellations, we could have gotten stuck with some extra wine. Conversely, we could have had too many guests, had not enough wine and a surplus of cash. (Yes, I know a surplus of cash is not a bad thing, but it would have been weird to bank our friend’s money.)
Plan B - We declared the evening "California Red Wine Night" and had everyone brought a bottle of their favorite Merlot, Cab, Pinot Noir, Sangria, or what have you and we did a casual tasting. We grouped all of the same wines together on one large table. One guest, who was very knowledgeable about wine designated himself as the wine pourer and had a blast doing it. We had some brown bags on hand for a "blind tasting" of a few different types of the same wine. Since we ended up with a few different bottles of J. Lohr Merlot from different years, we had an impromptu vertical tasting. This method ended up working out very well. We had enough wine for every guest. We didn’t have to feel funny collecting money from our friends. Everyone tasted the types of wine that they wanted to and had a great time doing it.
The only thing I would have done differently is to use evite.com for the invitations. Since I was the designated invitation emailer, I had a bit of cutting/pasting to do to our mailing lists as the RSVP's came in. Services like evite make it easy to see who’s coming & who’s not, as well as what everyone is going to bring.
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Epinions.com ID:
caroleg
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 - Top 1000 |
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Location: Boston, MA
Reviews written: 151
Trusted by: 185 members
About Me:
Live in Boston. Enjoy lots of home & garden things - especially epinions.
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