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Here is a guest post by author: Sandee Lembke.

Many of us have been to wine tastings at a winery or a local liquor store but have you ever hosted a wine tasting party at home?

It really is quite easy. First you need to decide what kind of wine party you are going to host.

Types of Wine Tasting Parties

Vertical — A tasting with an assortment of the same wine, from the same producer and vineyard, across several vintages (the year the grapes were harvested). An example is to taste Chardonnays from 2001, 2003 and 2006 all from the same vineyard.

Horizontal — Tasting various wines from the same vintage and ideally, wines from the same region and general style. The purpose of tasting one vintage is mainly to compare the different producers and vineyards. For example, Napa Valley red wines from 2001.

Blind — This is where you hide the identities of the wine by either wrapping them or putting them in paper bags. The bottles are numbered and scored without the tasters having the benefit of label, price, producer or anything else.

Guest Choice — This is the easiest wine tasting party to coordinate. Simply tell your guests to bring whatever kind of wine they choose. If you want to narrow them down a bit, be specific in your invitations, like “Bring a bottle of your favorite red wine, $20 limit” or “Bring your favorite bottle of Chardonnay, $15 limit.”

Obviously, you can combine some of these. How about hosting a Blind-Horizontal wine tasting party?

Setting Up Your Home

If you have the room set up 3 wine tasting stations; one for red wine, one for white and a third for the dessert wines. At each wine tasting station, have on hand:

A corkscrew
Measured pourers (serves exactly 1 oz. each time) Bottled water for rinsing mouths and glasses between tastes
A container for rinse water
Crackers for cleansing the palette between tastes
For the white and dessert wine stations, an ice bucket to keep the wine chilled

If you have separate wine tasting stations, you can increase the number of guests that you invite because everyone can spread out and start at different stations as opposed to everyone crowding around a single station. Either way, limit the number of guests to no more than 15 people. You want to easily be able to discuss the wines and having more people makes conversation difficult.

How Much Wine to Buy

If you are providing the wine yourself, keep in mind that a regular sized bottle of wine holds 750 milliliters or 25.4 ounces.

Using the Flip Top Measured Pourers, ensures that every guest receives an exact 1 ounce measure every time you pour. For $16.95, you get 3 of these nifty little gadgets and because they have a flip top, you can also store your wine with these

If you have 12 guests and use the pourers, you will only use half of each bottle (about 12 ounces) during the tasting process, leaving the rest to enjoy after tasting is over. Make sure you buy additional bottles of various wine to serve before and after the tasting.

Scoring the Wine

How wine savvy your guests are will determine if you score the wines during the tasting and if so, how you go about scoring them. Keeping things casual is usually your best bet because after all, it is a party. Typically, people do not want to be bothered with a complicated scoring process.

A good way to keep it easy is to give your guests a simple scorecard which lists the names of the wines. Ask them to force rank the wines in each category. For example, in the white category there are 5 wines to taste. Each person will score those 5 wines; 1 being their favorite and 5 being their least favorite.

At the end of the wine tasting, collect the scorecards and determine which wines are the party favorites in the wine category (reds, whites, desserts).

Lastly, to keep things simple, offer your guests meat, cheese, fruit and nut platters that complement your wine choices. This is a very important step in hosting a wine tasting party. You do not want your food choices to conflict with the wines you have chosen.

Hosting a wine tasting party at home is fun especially if you take the time to pick out some quality wines and pair those wines with good food. Your guests will appreciate the special care given when planning this type of party.

Article Source: Wine Tasting Party

About the Author:

Sandee Lembke from Theme Party Queen.com invites you to visit her site for a Free Wine Tasting Scorecard that you can download and a Free Wine-Cheese Pairings Table to help you select complementary food.

The Cellarer search engine highlights very interesting articles about wine tasting parties.

There are two distinct types of wine tasting “technical” or “hedonistic.”
They differ in method and purpose.

Technical tasting is for the professionnals. The principal aim is to assess a wine from a commercial viewpoint, does the wine have any faults, is it typical of its origin, can it be treated as an investment or should it be sold quickly? Such tastings are not organised with the pleasurable experience of wine drinking in mind, this is strictly business.

Hedonistic tastings are all about pleasure: the taster experiences the wine in the best possible conditions. Such tasting should be educational and should enable the participants to increase their knowledge of the product.

The two types of tastings do however overlap and neither should be pursued at the expense of the other. The most rewarding experience for the drinker comes from combining strict technique and the pleasurable art of tasting. Acquiring the technical expertise for tasting is really a matter of mastering a series of opertations which after a time becomes automatic.

SO HOW DO WE DO IT ?

It’s amazing how little most of us know about something we do as often as eating and drinking. Much has been written explaining what happens to food and drink once it enters our digestive system but very little is to be found on the complexed process known as tasting. Most of us realise that chewing our food helps prolong our enjoyment and that professional wine or tea tasters indulge in some unpleasant gargling. That, for the most of us constitues the sum total of our knowledge on the subject.

THE TONGUE

A sophisticated organ or blotting paper? If we were to rely entirely on the tongue to inform us about our food and drink, we would spend our days in confusion and disappointment. The human tongue is after all, fairly crude, only able to distinguish four basic sentations : sweet, sour, salt
and bitter: each being recorded on specific area of the tongue.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE NOSE

What we call the “taste” of something is the composite impression it makes on our minds by what we sense through our nose and mouth. The human nose is in fact much more sensitive than the mouth. Without our sense of smell , we are unable to appreciate food or distinguish between easily.

When chewing, the vapors travel from the back of our mouth, up what is called the retro-nasal passage, to the same sensory organs. So what we call “tasting” actually includes quite a bit of unconscious “smelling.”

THE EYES

Standard texts on wine tasting point out at an early stage that three organs are involved : eyes, nose, mouth - in that order. Authors usually start by giving their readers detailed exposition of what the sense of sight can reveal about a wine.
It is true that professionnal wine tasters spend quite some time “eyeing” the wine before putting glass to lips. The wine society however is here to indulge in the joys of consumption and not to simply admire the visual pleasure of a glass of Claret. The eye does neverhtless have an important role to play even for the pleasure drinker, anticipating a fault. Hazy wine indicates some kind of malady and suggests an uncharacteristic taste is likely. If the wine is browner that one would normally expect, then the wine is probably oxidized. This is due to back storage
or an inferior cork. An unexpected sparkle will make the wine worse than it should. The wine may be going through an unintentional secondary fermentation in the bottles.

Wine crystals are quite harmless and also quite rare. The wine trade sick of having bottles returned , now go to great lenghts to remove the offending articles by freezing and filtering before bottling. Bits of cork or deposits from the lip of the bottle in your glass are due to
careless opening and/or poor service.

SO LET’S DO IT

Condition and environment:

The taster must be in good health, there is a little point in attempting to savour the joys of the wine with a cold. For best results , the palate must be fresh and have had no recent contact with spicy foods, chocolate, mints or tobacco. The average palate is most alert between 10-11:00 am.

The setting is also very important. Ideally the room should be free from strong odours (including the perfume of the tasters) and well lit, preferably natural light. The ideal temperature should be about 20°-22°C.

Finally the glassware used should be thin scrupulously clean and tulip shaped.

On other quality websites: wine tasting.

Here is a list of vine varieties with a description of the red wines made from them.

On this website here is a list of white wine varietals.
Here are articles on other quality websites about: red wine varietals.