Wine or Champagne Tasting Party

INVITATIONS

These vintage-style invitations are reminiscent of a fancy label. Old-fashioned wine or champagne engravings, ornate swirls, grapes, and even some soft musical notes adorns this invitation. Your guests will be eager to come taste and a wonderful evening! Check out B.Nute’s Wine or Champagne Tasting Party invitations on etsy for details.

DECORATIONS

Pull out those organic, natural decorations, the wine glasses and of course the many bottles to taste, it’s time for some vineyard style fun.

Birthday Theme Party Ideas  >  Wine or Champagne Tasting Party

Pull out the delicious bottles from the cellar, it's time for a wine country inspired wine tasting or champagne tasting party. These vintage style tasting has the style of a fine wine-- elegant, smooth, and lots of fun!

PICTURES FROM A WINE OR CHAMPAGNE TASTING PARTY

If you throw a Wine or Champagne Party, send us the pictures! We’d love to include them on our website to show everyone the fun that was had!

FOOD & DRINK

Menu ideas to come...

GAME IDEAS

Wine Tasting 101: Using the Senses and Wine Tasting Terminology

Enjoying and understanding wine is all about using your senses - sight, smell, taste and touch. Although this is a party, a little education on terminology and tips on how to evaluate wine can be very useful. Here's some summarized information I gleaned from the book, The Wine Experience by Gérard Basset.

1. Sight - How a wine looks even before it is smelled or tasted is very important in the evaluation process. Here are categories to gauge how a wine looks:

1. •Clarity - Is the wine clear, cloudy, opaque?
   

2. •Brilliance - Is the wine bright, sparkly, or dull?
   

3. •Color - Hue: For instance, in a white wine is the hue yellow, greenish yellow, brownish yellow? Variation: Does the color vary when tilted to the side of the glass? Intensity: Is the color intense?
   

4. •Consistency - Fluidity/Viscosity: What is the fluidity or viscosity of the wine? This is when folks swirl the glass, and look for "legs".
   

2. Smell - The classic wine tasters swirl of his glass is not just for show. There is rhyme and reason for doing this! Swirl your wine carefully in the glass and then take one, two or three large sniffs before evaluating. Now use these categories to rate the smell:

1. •Condition - In this category, you determine wether or not the wine is drinkable. Is it corked or still fresh?
   

2. •Intensity - Intensity is the measurement of the smell strength. It can range from: close, weak, moderately open, open, powerful, to extremely powerful.
   

3. •Character - This is where you describe the family of smells (i.e., fruit, floral, animal, mineral, plant, etc.) Be sure to see the other wine tasting game ideas below to help in this category.
   

3. Taste/Palette or Touch - Of course, this is the best part, right? It's amazing how much we can actually determine from a wine by tasting it. This section will challenge even the most sensitive folks-- here are the many categories for evaluating a wines taste/palette

1. •Sugar - What is the sweetness level of the wine: bone dry, dry, off dry, medium dry, medium sweet, sweet, or very sweet.
   

2. •Acidity - What is the acidity level? Acidity in a wine creates a fresh, crisp feeling on the tongue. Is the level low, moderate, reasonable, marked, or high?
   

3. •Alcohol - Alcohol adds a slightly sweet taste to a wine and when it is at higher levels, it gives a warm almost burning feeling. Alcohol levels range from: low, moderate noticeable to high.
   

4. •Tannin - Tannin is mostly in red wines, and it produces a puckering or drying effect on the palate. It can be weak, soft, smooth, firm or rough.
   

5. •Carbon Dioxide - All wines have some level of Carbon Dioxide in them. It produces a similar taste to acidity. Some words for wines with higher levels of Carbon Dioxide are refreshing, zesty, prickly.
   

6. •Body - A wine with body gives the feeling of weight in the mouth. The levels range from think, light, middleweight, full-bodied, to heavy.
   

7. •Structure/Texture - This is a combination of the wine's body and texture. It ranges from coarse, solid, tight, juicy, supple, round to flat.
   

8. •Flavors - The flavor should be the confirmation of what the nose smelled.
   

9. •Balance - Just like the word's definition, balance is when a wine has harmony between all the elements mentioned here. Is it one sided on one element, or well rounded?
   

10. •Length - This seems to be a very esoteric judgement, but I'm sure many wine gurus can help define this description!
    

Work that Nose! - A Smelling Game

Once while indulging in a wine tasting weekend in Sonoma, we happened upon a winery with a great tool for helping with wine tasting. They had several jars set out filled with items that contain flavors typically found in wines. It was really helpful to smell each jar separately and "refresh" my memory of these odors. It was very helpful too when tasting the wine to give some vocabulary to describe what was tasted and/or smelled. Here are some everyday items you can place in glass Ball jars (with lids) for folks to smell at will!

1. •Honey
   

2. •Lavender sprigs
   

3. •Fresh cut herbs
   

4. •Vanilla Beans
   

5. •Blackberries
   

6. •Raspberries
   

7. •Vinegar
   

8. •Oak Bark/Wood
   

9. •Maple Syrup
   

10. •Fresh Dirt
    

11. •Dried cranberries
    

12. •Black Licorice
    

13. •Dirty socks!
    

It's All About the Descriptive Words

It's amazing what words some come up with to describe a wine! One may mistake the description for an online dating ad! Here are some useful links to descriptive words for wine that you can print out and have around for guests to use.

1. •Glossary of Wine Tasting Terms
   

2. •Wine Appreciation Course - Red Wine Tasting Terms and Descriptors (scroll to bottom of page)
   

3. •Wine Appreciation Course - White Wine Tasting Terms and Descriptors (scroll to bottom of page)
   

4. •eRobert Parker Glossary of Wine Terms
   

To have fun at the party, have each guest pick one of their favorite wines and write up a description of it. The funnier, or more descriptive adjectives, the better! Once complete, have each person read their description and folks can decide which wine they wrote about.

Guess that Wine - Sorting through Marketing Hype with a Blind Tasting

Blind tastings are always fun. Depending on your guests' wine sophistication, you can either provide no hints to what they are tasting, or provide hint. You may specify the variety, or regions, or years... but another fun hint mechanism is to hand out a list of the wines description as written by the vintners Marketing team. This may be found on the back of the wine label, or on the wine/vintner's website. It can be amusing to see how accurate everyone thinks the descriptions are, and/or what is thought to be just marketing or advertising hype!

ENTERTAINMENT

These days, you can't go to a wine tasting party, or for that matter, a dinner party and not be offered a wine glass tag to mark each persons' glass! So, to go along with my Wine Tasting Party Invitations, I've created some matching vintage style wine glass tags I'd love to share with you!

Just click on the image below, and print it out!

Free Printable Vintage Style Wine Glass Tag by B.Nute

Instructions for Making Wine Glass Tags:

1. •I suggest using a card stock to print the design on so it is a bit heavier weight.
   

2. •Once printed, cut the circles out along the light black line, and punch a hole in the center.
   

3. •Write your guest's names in between the 2 grape bunches.
   

4. •Voila, a vintage style wine tag for your party!
   

Vintage Style Wine Tags Printed and In Use!

GOODIE BAG

Goodie bag ideas to come...

TREATS

Treat ideas to come...

Inspiration Board

This party is all about a natural, vineyard style... think harvest items and nature and your decorations will be perfect. Here some more specific decoration ideas for your wine tasting party....

1. •Old Wood - Find a tray sized piece of wood in a salvage yard, clean off the cobwebs, buff it up, and use it to serve some hors d'oeurves. It will look great!
   

2. •Baskets - Small baskets of dried fruit and baguette pieces will look great as well as help out during the wine tasting. Line the basket with a decorative napkin in harvest colors and fill. It's as easy as that!
   

3. •Leaves, Twigs and Berries - Fill a tin vase, or natural looking pitcher with large twigs and tall leaves. This will make a great center piece for the table.
   

4. •Stone and Ceramics - Stone, granite or ceramic slabs make great cheese plates. You can pick up samples at your local hardware store that should be the perfect size. If you use a terra cotta paver, say, you can write in chalk on it to indicate the cheese variety.
   

5. •Burlap - A natural fabric like burlap will look great as a table runner or table accent.
   

6. •Old Wine Bottle Labels - If you have access to some old wine labels, you could scatter them about the tasting table for setting the mood.
   

7. •Dried Fruits, Figs, Apricots, and Nuts - These all make great nibbles for the wine tasting, but will also look good too when set out in small ceramic bowls around the wine tasting area.