Host Your Own Wine Tasting Party

The holiday season is nearly upon us and wine tasting is a great indoor activity that just naturally seems to go well with the holidays.

Hosting your own wine tasting party can be a fun, easy, and relatively low-cost social event. Certainly, you can open up a few bottles of wine, toss in some munchies and call it good. But with a little imagination and a bit of advance planning, I guarantee that you and your guests will have a much better time.

With that in mind, choosing a theme is first and foremost to hosting a successful wine tasting party. For example, you can serve wines of the same varietal such as all fume blancs or all merlots. Or you can serve wines from a particular region – say, Tuscany, California’s Sonoma Valley or Southeastern Australia.

One of my favorite themes is a blind tasting. Each guest brings one bottle of same varietal. The host places each bottle in a paper bag, numbers it, and hands out score sheets where guests can rate and comment on the wines. There are several variations on this theme, but the bottom line is that everyone shares in the cost and is able to sample a variety of wines in a relaxed setting that’s conducive to socializing and exchanging opinions.

If you’d like to learn more about hosting your own wine tasting party, I’ll be teaching a class centered around this topic on Saturday, November 4 from 2:30 to 4:30 pm at Bellingham Technical College. The focus will be on Champagne and sparkling wines for the holidays and students will get a chance to participate in a blind tasting featuring three viogniers and three syrahs. Register by calling the college at 752-8350 or visit www.btc.ctc.edu.

Special thanks to Mrs. Kimberly Dooley, who co-hosted some of my first wine tasting parties in the early 1980’s. Kim has been a true and loyal friend for a long time. And I mean a really long time… 🙂