How to Choose Wines for your Wedding

Wedding Wines - What you need to know

Deciding on what wedding wines you want to provide for your guests on the big day is an important decision - nearly as important as the food for some people.

You really don’t want your friends and relations to sit down to a carefully prepared meal and have it spoiled by poor wines. If you were having a party in your home you would at least make sure that the first bottle of wine is a good one. The quality of the wine can lessen as the night goes on as let’s face it - people will get too drunk to notice whether you are serving a £10 bottle or a £5 one.

Think of the wine you will have on the tables as the first bottle of a long evening. You want your guests to remember the first wine fondly.
Some things worth remembering:

1. How many bottles to order? 
It is normal to have one bottle per three wine-drinkers. Better to have wine proportions higher on tables are aged 30-60 (ie. the accepted wine drinking demographic). Generally, younger guests will probably be happier with a drink from the bar. Older than that and they may only have one glass with the meal before moving onto spirits.

2. Red, Wine or Rose? 
Rose wine is not traditionally suited to accompany food and is best enjoyed on a summers evening in the garden with a few friends. Red wine generally goes best with red meat or hearty food, while white wine is ideal with fish, chicken, vegetarian dishes etc. You are likely to be serving a range of food groups (only confirmed carnivores want meatballs followed by a rib roast and a black pudding trifle to finish) so therefore offer a choice of red and white with the meal.

3. What grape variety? 
Though you may like Viognier or Malbec, your guests may not have tried them before and your wedding is not the best time to test people’s palates. Better to stick to the more popular varieties - Cabernet, Shiraz or Merlot for the red and maybe Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio or Chardonnay for the wine. Go with to one red variety and one white, having a range is a recipe for disaster as people will want to try all the wines and will end up intoxicated by 8pm from mixing their drinks too early. Sticking to the main varieties may be conventional but it does not make them ‘boring’, as there are a lot of good versions of these wines out there - which lead us to:

4. What to choose from the hotel’s limited wine list? 
Unless you are catering for your own wedding, you will be asked to select from the range of wines the hotel or venue provides. They will attempt to persuade you into selecting their most profitable wines. These will be the ones they sell a lot of and therefore get a good discount from the supplier and are not necessarily the best value for you. Remember it’s your wedding and they want your business so you feel free to haggle a bit on the price. There’s always a huge mark-up on the retail price and often the hotel will charge you three times the price they buy them for - so there is a lot of room for manoeuver. It’s also worth noting that though the hotel have a much broader range of wines available to them than it may appear. Hotels and other venue buy their wines from importers or distributors who will have a much larger portfolio. Ask to see the distributor’s wine list. It’s a little more hassle for the hotel but the distributor will fall over themselves to be helpful and you will get better advise...and the wines you want!

5. I want the wines to be personalised for the wedding?
A popular option now available is to have the wines personalised with the bride and groom’s names, date and wedding location. Again, unless you are organising your own catering, the hotel or venue will be very reluctant to allow you to bring along your own wines as it will mean a big drop in profit for them. To allow for this, hotels will sometimes let you supply your own personalised wines, which you may have been purchased on-line, but will charge a huge ‘corkage’ for simply opening the bottle (even screwtops). This can be as much as £8 per bottle...yes I know!

An alternative is to simply purchase the personalised labels and put them on the wine agreed by the hotel or venue in advance. They can be as little as £1 per label and are printed on quality peel & stick paper to make re-labelling easy. Try www.spottyspoon.com - it makes it very easy to create your own design and order prints.