Our friends love participating in the food and wine-tasting sessions that form the basis for our “Wine With” feature here on WRO, and I bet yours would too. This can be a really fun and simple way to entertain a small group of friends, with wine education as a probable added benefit. Here are a few tips to help you plan your own “Wine With” party.
The first thing to do is determine how many guests to invite. When we are working on a “Wine With” column, we find that a total of four people is best (two guests plus the two of us) since we need to factor in certain considerations such as taking legible notes. But for a more informal, simple get-together / wine-tasting, the number of participants depends on what kind of event you want it to be. A sit-down dinner gets cumbersome when more than 6 or 8 people are involved, since even if you do have a table large enough to accommodate that number of guests, you’ll need plenty of extra space for the wine bottles, notepads, and dump buckets, not to mention the food itself. If you want to make it a bigger party, buffet service works best. Keep in mind, too, that more people means a greater number and variety of wines to be sampled, and inebriation should not really be the theme of the evening (remember the old warning: over-consumption of alcohol may lead you to mistakenly believe that people are laughing with you).
Time to think next about what to serve. The simple beauty of this sort of entertaining is that you really want to focus on a single dish so as not to confuse the palate. It’s also a good idea to keep pre-dinner drinking and noshing to a minimum for the sake of the palate, the appetite, and concerns about over-consumption. I don’t mean to overemphasize this last point, but trust me, people can easily drink far more than they realize in a format like this. You take a sip of wine and a nibble of food, try another wine and another nibble, then go back to that third white wine, and…well, you get the idea. (What’s that other warning? Something about alcohol consumption leading to the belief that you can carry on an intimate conversation without spitting?)
Okay, on to the main course. Ideally, you’re serving a one-dish meal to keep the focus on pairing wine with a specific food. To get you started, here are some dishes that I’ve found work well for a wine tasting dinner: Cassoulet, Paella, Jambalaya, Lasagna, Salmon (grilled or poached), Chili, Curried Anything. Most of these dishes have the further advantage of being prepared a day or two ahead of time. Alternatively you could emphasize simple classics with the goal of determining which wines really do taste best with steak, burgers, ribs, spaghetti and meatballs, lasagna. Another option would be to take the really simple route and pick up buckets of fried chicken, or sushi, pizza, enchiladas, or rotisserie chicken.
As for the wines, tell your guests what the focal dish will be, and ask each of them to bring a bottle of wine that he or she thinks will pair well with it. Everyone loves a blind tasting, so make sure the participants know in advance to hide the label by wrapping the entire bottle of wine tightly in aluminum foil or in a brown paper bag (secured with a rubber band at the top to discourage peeking), and of course segregate whites from reds at the party.
For an additional nice touch, the host can provide small notebooks, or at least pieces of paper, and pens, for guests to make notes on the wines they like best. Encourage them to decide which wine they think brings out the best qualities in the food, and vice versa, as opposed to which one they like best on its own. Have them rank the wines in order of preference, their top three or five wines, say. And do have plenty of dump buckets available–use large pails, ice buckets, old paint buckets, a big stock pot, whatever you can find.
And one last thing: You might want to introduce the evening with a word of caution, perhaps paraphrasing an old quip attributed to George Burns: “It takes only one glass of wine to get me loaded. Unfortunately I can’t remember whether it’s the thirteenth or fourteenth.”
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