Category: Cocktails

Primer for Buying Wine

An easy manual for making one part of your own special day forgettable

 No, we’re not encouraging you to serve cheap tasting wine to your guests.  We’re providing  you with an easy guide that will make selecting your wines an easy task. One you can quickly check off from your to-do list.  So relax, pour a glass of wine and browse through these tips for a successful celebration. Make your choices and forget about it!

Where Do I Begin?

Start out planning to stock one white and one red, plus a sparkling for the toast.

How Much Should I Plan to Buy?

Typically, the rule is two glasses of wine per person one glass of sparkling wine for the toast and additionally a glass of wine per hour after the first three hours.

Generally servings of sparkling wine are less than when serving red or white wine.  You can plan on getting 8 glasses from sparkling wine and typically six glasses from a bottle of red or white wine.

 How Do I Calculate What I’ll Need?

Let’s use a round number. {It’s easier that way} Round your number up or down accordingly.  We’ll go with 20 guests.

Remember you can expect to get 8 glasses from a bottle of sparkling wine and 6 from the table wine.

Let’s start with sparkling wine used for the toast:

20 guests x 1 glass per person =  20 glasses/8 glasses per bottle = 3 bottles

Now let’s calculate the table wine:

20 guests x 2 glasses per person = 40 glasses/6 glasses per bottle = 7 bottles

Plan to purchase 3 bottles of sparkling, 7 red and 7 white bottles of wine.

Do Your Friends Like to Drink?

You’ll need to take this into consideration.  The younger the crowd the more alcohol is consumed.  If this is the case consider bumping up the minimum:

Sparkling wine:
(20 people x 2 glasses per person = 40 glasses/8 glasses per bottle = 5 bottles)

Table wine
(20 people x 3 glasses per person = 60 glasses/6 glasses per bottle = 10 bottles)

Using this revised formula plan to purchase 5 bottles of sparkling, 10 red and 10 white bottles of wine.

But What About The Other Alcohol?

An open bar is important in factoring how much wine you’ll need for your party. That earlier figure could very well drop by more than half.  On the other hand, if you’re only serving beer, wine and champagne and you have bunch of drinkers, that figure could increase by 25% to 50%.

How Do I Account for the Open Bar?

For an open bar you might want to include .75 glasses per hour as the consumption rate.  If you’re party will last longer than the initially calculated three hours consider this as well.  Let’s bump up the party duration to five hours. You’ll need an extra 5 bottles added to the total calculated above.  This would bring your total to 10 bottles of table wine.

Your formula would look like this:

(20 people x 2 extra hours x .75 glasses per person = 30 glasses/ 6 glasses per bottle = 5 extra bottles)

If you’re not having an open bar but serving a thirsty crowd consider using 1.25 glasses per hour as your consumption rate. You’ll need an extra eight bottles added to the total calculated.  This would bring your total to eighteen bottles of table wine.

Your formula would look like this:

(20 people x 2 extra hours x 1.25 glasses per person = 50 glasses/ 6 glasses per bottle = 8 extra bottles)

Remember, all you need to figure out how much wine to buy is a basic math formula and calculated guesses.