We recently hosted a wine tasting party and I wanted to share the details on how you can easily host one for your friends too!
I created a “save the date” that was sent in August. This was sent to all of our friends via text message to each of them. You could also use Evite or one of the invitation planning sites to do this as well! This just works the best for me!
About a month before, I sent the invitation, with a few more details.
As the date got closer, I created a “copy/paste” message in the Notes app of my iPhone and was able to easily text more details to the guests attending as well as the guests who had not yet RSVP’d.
Our wine tasting is 2 weeks away!
A few more details…
This is a competition! Please bring one bottle of wine to enter the blind tasting. We will bag each bottle and number them.
We will begin the tasting competition at 7:30 p.m.
Keep track of what you like because you will need to vote for your favorites and the top 3 wines will be announced, unveiled, and prizes awarded!
If you’d like to bring more than one wine to enter the tasting, feel free!
Please also remember a bottle of wine to share that is not in the tasting.
If you haven’t RSVP’d please remember to by Oct 14.
We asked guests to bring a bottle to share so that we would have a variety of wine available to enjoy prior to the start of the tasting. Note that if you indicate that the party starts at 7:00 p.m. and the tasting starts at 7:30 p.m., most of your guests will show up at 7:00 p.m.! Be prepared! Generally speaking, I am ready – but this time I was not! More details below…
One week prior to the event, I sent the following text:
Wine Tasting! Next Saturday!
We are looking forward to seeing you next Saturday! A couple of notes:
This will be held in our backyard and we will have neaters if needed, please dress expecting to be outdoors!
Upon arrival, we will be asking everyone to sign in with their wine for the tasting competition.
See you next Saturday!
As guests were entering our home, I set up a “photo opp” backdrop that was fall themed, so got some great pix from some of our guests! Unfortunately The Hubby and I failed to get our photo in front of it!
Some guests arrived with their bottles already in bags, but the key here is to ensure no one knows which wine belongs to which guest. I unbagged them and put them in the bags to match all of the other wines being entered.
I also had several of these sign up sheets printed on our kitchen island to avoid a line.
At this point, I would highly recommend starting to bag and label the bottles. Grab your spouse, a friend, someone to help you. You’ll want to do this so that guests aren’t peeking to see how their wine was labeled! We used paper lunch sacks, labels that we numbered as we bagged the wine, and then used masking tape to secure the top of the bag.
I would also suggest either keeping tabs now or before you open all of the wine at the end to know the number associated with each bottle of wine. We kept track for the top 3, but didn’t for the rest. It would have been nice to be able to share that with the guests at the end of the evening.
We also served charcuterie and desserts – it was the perfect amount of food for the evening! You can see more images of the food and set up here on my TikTok video.
Everyone was able to grab a pen and a voting card to take notes along the way and then I set up a bucket to collect the votes once everyone had tasted all of the wines. I printed the voting cards so that they were 2-sided, one for their notes, and one to vote for their top wine…yes, just one.
As our guests were enjoying the food, company, and more wine of course…I headed inside to tally up the votes. We selected some wine themed items off of Amazon as our prizes for the top 3.
Our winning wine was 19 Crimes Snoop Cali Red – by a bit of a landslide!
Congratulations to all of our winners! We can’t wait to do this again next fall! Cheers!
