Wine Tasting Party

First off, I just have to give props where they are due. I am married to most giving man ever. I can't believe how willingly he goes along with my craziness. Just one example. Last Tuesday night as we sat around eating dinner and talking about my upcoming birthday I suddenly decided I wanted to have a party. Not just any party, a wine tasting party. My head was teaming with ideas, all of which would cause tons of work for me (and the hubbster) during the week. Instead of telling me I was crazy for planning an elaborate last minute birthday celebration he went along with it and helped me make it work. Now, this might not be all that impressive to you, but on top of being supportive of my last minute birthday wishes, which meant extra work for him, he also had a killer week at work. He leaves tomorrow for Florence where he will be giving a talk at a conference so he has been working like a madman to get himself prepared. And I unkindly dump my plans to have a party straight into his lap. What a good guy!

So, anyways the party was a great success. Naturally, I forgot to take any pictures at all. I'll have to photograph the massive amount of empty wine bottles and an example of how the blind tasting went. I made little bags for the wine bottles labeled A, B, & C so we had multiple rounds of tasting. Each person brought a bottle of wine - actually, many people even brought 2 so there was plenty of wine to be had. I had made up slips of paper so you could mark down your impressions of each wine. We did the Sight, Sniff, Swig tasting method. You looked at the color of the wine ( I usually wrote something very insightful like, It's red or It's white) then we swirled it around stuck our schnoz down in the glass and took a big sniff. I could never describe the aroma. Mostly it just smelled like wine to me. Then we took a swig and this is where the descriptions got interesting. One wine was described as tasting like cow pee. How one might know what that tastes like is better left unasked. The funniest part was the person who wrote that it tasted of cow pee was the person who brought that very wine! ha, ha, the joke was on him!

Not only were my guests expected to faithfully fill out their wine cards, I also forced them to play games. During different rounds of tasting you had to figure out what region the wine came from, or the varietal. It was good fun. Being experts at tasting wine (snort, giggle) we all took wild guesses. I did make it easier by saying, "OK, there are 3 wines here. One is a local French wine, one is a Californian wine, and one is a Bulgarian wine. Guess which is which." It was fun. If you guessed the most correctly you won a prize. I had a grab bag full of wrapped prizes. I had a laugh picking out the cheapest, cheesiest things I could. There was a plastic soccer whistle, alien shaped erasers, a giggle stick, a cow in a can (when you turned it over it mooed like a cow - one of my favorites), 6 tiny, pink, Cinderella yoyos...tons of junk like that. You can imagine how excited people were when they won!

I also made everyone take a wine quiz and write their own wine notes - which were then read aloud. some of them were hysterical. I'll have to look around and see if I have any left. one said, this wine pairs perfectly with stale Christmas candy and post-Christmas orgasms. What more could one ask for in a wine?

By the end of the evening I had drank a wee too much wine and fell asleep on the couch. Thankfully everyone except our upstairs neighbor was gone so they didn't witness this embarrassing display of my lack of restraint when it comes to drinking wine. I think a wine tasting party is definitely something we should do again...only next time I won't be the server, which resulted in me pouring myself a glass of wine approximately every 5-10 minutes. Yeah, that might have been the problem.

anyhoo, I think everyone had a good time, I know I did and I'm the birthday girl so in the end that's all that matters -right?