Planning and Hosting a Wine Tasting Dinner - Part 2

Last week I covered some of the basics of how to plan a wine tasting dinner for friends and family. In this week’s blog, I’ll share some additional secrets for planning and pulling off a successful wine tasting dinner!

Our Florida wine tasting dinner table - photo by Laurie Geis

Wine tasting dinners are a great way to bring people together to educate everyone on the wonderful world of food and wine and how the two can be brought together to create an amazing gastronomical experience! And they are great fun as well. But pulling them off takes a good deal of planning and preparation ahead of time, so I decided to share my secrets for planning and hosting a wonderful wine tasting dinner that will be enjoyed by all!

In last week’s blog, I covered the first steps of planning a wine tasting party – those included figuring out who you will invite to the party, selecting a theme for the dinner, and deciding how many courses you will serve. This week we’ll cover the rest of the steps in the planning process.

Next up is selecting your wine and food pairings for each course. Now we get to the really fun part of planning a wine tasting dinner! For the wine, a good place to start is with your favorite wines – choose wines that you enjoy drinking and that you are familiar with. You can also visit your local wine shop and ask the staff to recommend some of their favorite wines.

For our FL wine tasting, I knew I wanted to showcase a wine each from Virginia, New York, and Washington so I started with those first. I had both a really nice Virginia and Washington wine in our cellar already but needed to find a nice New York wine. New York wineries specialize in Riesling, so I did a bit of research in the wine magazines and then visited the local wine stores to pick up a few to taste. In the end, I settled on a nice dry Riesling from upstate New York. I then rounded out the rest of the wine selections by picking wines from New Mexico, Oregon, and of course, California to keep with the “Wines across America” theme.

With the wines selected, I then started the process of deciding which dishes I would pair with each wine. It’s important to have tasted all the wines before this step, unless you are getting help from someone who has already tasted the wine and can describe it enough to help you select a matching dish that will pair well with it. Since we have hosted so many wine tasting dinners, I started with previous menus and dishes that were perennial favorites and also really easy to make. Then, to keep it interesting, I took a trip through our recipe file to pick out the rest of the dishes.

For the food, and I can’t stress this strongly enough, select dishes: (a) that you have made before and are comfortable making, or that you are going to make and sample before the dinner; and (b) that are easy to make, and don’t require a lot of last-minute work to bring them together. In fact, my goal is to pick a menu where I can make most if not all of the dishes ahead of time so all I have to do is assemble the different components of the dish the night of the dinner. The one exception is usually the main course, but even then, I try to pick something that can simply be put in the oven to cook to keep it simple.

Next, develop your plan for preparing the dishes and doing as much work as possible ahead of time. The week of your wine tasting dinner, make a shopping list of everything you will need and buy all the ingredients at least two days before the dinner. To ensure you can find all the wines you selected, I’d recommend doing your wine buying at least a week before the dinner just in case you can’t find a wine you were going to serve and need to identify a suitable substitute.

I start doing prep work the day before the dinner – doing so will ensure you don’t spend the entire day of the dinner in the kitchen and will give you time to relax before your guests arrive. I prep the ingredients for each dish one course at a time. In some cases, you can make the dish ahead of time and simply store in the refrigerator until it’s time to heat it up or serve it (for example, making a panna cotta for dessert which can be made 1 or 2 days in advance). In other cases, you can prepare all the ingredients for the dish so they are ready when it’s time to assemble and bring it all together (for example, preparing all the ingredients for a salad (wash the lettuce, make the croutons, make the dressing, etc.) and them combining them all once you are ready to serve).

Doing all this work ahead of time will ensure that you have time to enjoy the wine tasting dinner with your guests which is the whole point, right??!!

Finally, think about your wine as well as your wine and food pairings and prepare your thoughts on how you will introduce them to your guests. Remember, a wine tasting dinner is so fun partly because everyone is learning something new about wine, and wine and food pairings. So, make sure you can talk a bit about each wine you will be serving (the variety and its characteristics, the producer of the wine, and any interesting anecdotes you might have about the wine itself), and why you decided to pair it with a particular dish and what makes the match of the two a good one.

In my next blog post, I’ll cover my secrets for how to bring everything together for hosting the perfect wine tasting dinner!