Purchasing Wine for Parties
By Ian Love

When you are entertaining, you need to provide more wines than just those that you enjoy. You need to provide a range of wine for every palate when you entertain. You will need to provide white wine even if you prefer red. If all you ever drink is white, you should still provide red for your guests.

Not only should you provide both red and white, you should provide a full spectrum of red and a full spectrum of white. From sweet white wines to bold, dry red wines, you have several varietals from which to choose for every type of red or white wine.

For white wine selections, you will want to be sure to include a dry white selection as well as a fruity white selection. To appease the sweeter palate, you should probably purchase Chardonnay or Chenin Blanc and to appease the more tart palate, you could purchase Pinot Grigio or Sauvignon Blanc.

Your red wine selections will be as varied as your white wine selections. For a fruitier palate, you will want to choose lighter reds such as Pinot Noir and for your guests with a palate for tart dry reds; you will want to purchase Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Shiraz or Chianti.

With such a wide variety of wines, you will also need to know how much of each type of wine to serve when you entertain. As a rule, if the majority of your guests were new to wine drinking, you would probably be better off to purchase more sweet or fruity whites and reds and only a few of the drier, tart reds and whites. Conversely, if you are entertaining experienced wine drinkers, you will probably only purchase a few sweet whites and reds and several dry varietals.

Of course, knowing how much wine to purchase overall can be a daunting task. You can never definitely know how much a crowd will drink, but you can make a fair estimation. You know your guests better than anyone does, but most crowds are comprised of non-drinkers, beer drinkers and wine drinkers.

In fact, at most parties, about half of the people in attendance drink wine. These wine drinkers usually have two glasses each, though some people quit with one glass and other people drink three or four glasses. In the end, though, you can count on an average of two glasses per person that is drinking wine.

Because only half of the people at your party will be drinking wine, you can safely say that you need to provide one glass of wine per person who attends. However, if you are like most people, you will prefer to err on the side of over abundance and provide one and a half glasses of wine per person.

When serving wine at parties, you usually serve five 5-ounce glasses from each bottle, so if you are going to have 20 guests, you should count on 30 glasses of wine, which divided by five, is six bottles of wine.

Ian Love is the boss of Australian wine shop - Liquor Merchants, and owns top Perth restaurant Coco's. He runs a great wine club in Perth.

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