Planning and Hosting a Wine Tasting Dinner - Part 1

Most people think they could never host a wine tasting dinner, either because they don’t know enough about wine, or they believe it would simply be too difficult and stressful to pull off a dinner with multiple courses. But the truth is, anyone can plan and host a wine tasting dinner and I’m here to share my secrets for how to pull it off without a hitch!

Laurie and I love hosting wine tasting dinners! Before COVID, we would invite friends over regularly for multi-course wine and food tasting dinners. In addition to being great fun, these dinners were educational as we talked about the wines and whether we liked them or not, as well as whether the wines paired well with the food and why (or why not!). Now that we are all settled into our new home in Florida and we have all learned to live with COVID, we decided to invite some of our new neighbors over for our first wine tasting dinner in three years. I thought it would be fun to share some of the details about how I plan our wine tasting dinners, and what it takes to host a successful wine tasting dinner.

It turns out that anyone can do this, but it does take some planning and work to pull it off. And no, you don’t have to be a wine connoisseur or a professional chef – you just have to have a love for food, wine, and entertaining. So, here are my secrets for planning and hosting the perfect wine tasting dinner, in three parts!

When planning a wine tasting dinner, you need to think through a few details before settling on your food and wine pairings for the meal:

• First, figure out who you will be inviting to the dinner. The guest list will drive a lot of the details that follow. Make sure to choose people who either like wine or are interested in learning about it (that might sound obvious, but sometimes you don’t really know!). It’s fine to invite a mix of wine novices and more experienced wine drinkers if you’d like – that really gets the conversation going and brings a lot of different perspectives to the table as well. Also, we have found that the perfect number of people for a wine tasting dinner is six (including the hosts) – the smaller number of guests keeps things from getting overwhelming for the host and makes it easier to stay on schedule. For our FL wine tasting dinner, we invited two couples who live down the street, who know each other, and who enjoy drinking and learning about wine but don’t necessarily consider themselves wine connoisseurs.

• Next, identify the theme for the dinner. Every wine tasting dinner needs a theme. I always start by deciding whether the wine or the food is going to drive the menu. For example, you could decide you want to host a wine tasting dinner that showcases your Italian cuisine cooking skills. Or you could decide to showcase French wines for the dinner. The sky’s the limit on what theme you pick – be creative and have fun with it! In one case, one of the couples we invited for a wine tasting dinner were vegetarians, so we ended up with a vegetarian menu for the entire dinner (that was probably my most challenging dinner ever!). In another case, I did a paired wine tasting for each course – each wine pair included a value wine (less than $20) and a premium wine (more than $50) and were tasted side-by-side “blind” meaning our guests didn’t know which was which. It was great fun to see whether they could tell which wines were the more expensive wines, and whether they liked the cheaper or more expensive wines better! In Florida, everyone is from somewhere, except Florida! We moved here from Virginia, while the two couples we invited moved here from New York and the state of Washington. So, I decided it would be fun to showcase wines from across America, and include wines produced in each of the states we came from as well as others. In this case, I decided on a wine-driven theme for the dinner, picking the wines first and then figuring out a good food pairing for each wine.

• Third, decide how many courses you will serve. If this is your first wine tasting dinner, I’d recommend starting with no more than four courses (appetizer, soup or salad, main course, and desert), but usually, our wine tasting dinners consist of six or seven courses. Given the number of courses, the portions are “tasting” portions meaning they are each just a few bites, with the exception of the main course which is a bit larger. This ensures that everyone leaves full but not stuffed and bloated! With seven courses, I usually start with an appetizer, followed by a bread-based course, soup course, salad course, main course, cheese course, and finally desert course. When picking the wine, try to include some variety into the mix – I usually start with white wine for the first few courses and then transition to red after that for the final few courses (the wine for the desert course could be either white or red and usually a sweeter wine like port or a white dessert wine).

In my next blog post, I’ll cover the last steps for planning a successful wine tasting dinner and following that, my secrets for hosting the perfect wine tasting dinner.

Until then, let me know if you have any particular questions about planning or hosting a wine tasting dinner that I might be able to help you answer!