It's summer, and that means wedding season; perhaps you or someone you know is planning a wedding? A few tips for dealing with the wine aspect of it:
The general rule of thumb is that each adult will have 1 drink per hour. That's an average, taking into account your teetotaler cousin Julie, and your lush of a brother-in-law Chris. Over a long party (more than 3 hours), in fact, people will tend to drink a bit less than that, but it's a good place to start.
You get about 4 pours and a splash from a normal wine bottle. Therefore, for a 3-hour long reception, plan on 3 bottles of wine for every 4 guests. For toasting, you get about 8 pours out of a sparkling wine bottle, so plan on a bottle for every 8 guests or so (unless you intend on having a sparkling wine throughout the reception, in which case treat it as you would wine, as people go through bubbly faster).
Now, if this seems like a lot of wine -- I mean, let's face it, I'm saying "get 75 bottles of wine for 100 people, plus 12 bottles of bubbly for toasting, for a 3-hour reception with 100 people,"-- remember that I'm trying to overestimate the amount of wine people will drink; that way, you don't run out. Most wine stores will take returns with a receipt, provided they can resell the wine (so don't dunk them in ice, which will make the labels peel). If they don't have a return policy... you might want to consider another store.
As for the debate of how much red/white should you get, figure about 50-50. In our hypothetical reception, I'd get around 3 cases of each. When selecting wines, plan on a red and a white -- a cab and a chard, a Chianti and a pinot grigio, whatever. But only one (or at most two) of each color -- keep it simple, make your life (and your bartender's life) easier.
As for the quality of wine -- don't skimp, but don't feel the need to pull out top-flight wines for a wedding reception. Most people really aren't paying attention to the wine at that point, so why waste bottles of $50 cab, when $10 cab would do just as well?
Similarly, for the toast, Champagne is nice, but expensive. Why not toast with Cava, or Prosecco, or Cremant? The quality level of many non-Champagne sparkling wines is very high (and most people can't tell the difference between a Prosecco and a Champagne, really), and they're much less expensive. Also, why limit yourself to brut? If you're toasting with wedding cake, try something sweeter!
Of course, you may want a couple of bottles of good stuff for the head table -- a nice Champagne, a top-shelf cab, whatever. But that's more of a splurge for the bride and groom than anything else.
So, how do you budget? Again, consider the hypothetical wedding above -- 100 people, a 3-hour reception means about 7 cases of wine. If you've got a $1000 budget for wine, it means you've got to keep it under about $12 a bottle (and, if you worry that this is too much money for an event -- it's $7 a person. Or, roughly what an open bar will charge you for a glass of Beringer.).
So what would I choose for a wedding like this? Let's go with a standard merlot/chard/sparkling mix; for the merlot, there's any number of good California and Washington wines that fall under that price point. My favorite here would be one called Buffalo Grove -- it's light, friendly, and hits a lot of people's sweet spots. Coming in at $6 a bottle, or $64.80 a case (with a 10% discount), we've got $194.40 in cheap reds. A good bottle, for the head table, would be something like Twomey, which should run about $50 or $60, so let's call the red $250 total.
On the white side, there's even more choices. Again, trying to keep it under $12, a favorite is Cupcake, a Central Coast chard that's got plenty of cream, a little oak, and nice ripe pineapple flavors. At $10-ish, it's $108 a case, so $324 in cheap whites. Add a bottle of Mer Soleil, at $35, and we can call it $360 in whites. Running total: $610
Finally, there's the bubbles -- here, we'll go a bit over the $12-a-bottle mark. For general consumption, I'd look at something like Louis Bouillot, a very nice Cremant de Bourgogne, that runs about $16 a bottle for either the brut or extra dry (slightly sweeter). A case will run $172.80, so call it $175. The running total at this point is $785, which yields a lot of wiggle room for a really nice bottle of Champagne for the head table. A personal favorite would be Feuillatte's Palmes D'Or vintage, which comes in at about $120 a bottle. So, there, for just over $900 (out of a budget of $1,000), is a wedding for 100 people.
And, the best part is, since we've over-estimated consumption slightly, the likelihood is that the happy couple will either have some wine to stock away in their new household, or a nice little return of $100 or so when they come home from the honeymoon.
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