Wine for the Holidays
We are dashing full speed into the abyss known as “the year-end holidays,” and while the prospect of celebration may be joyous, there is pressure too. If one is a wine lover, there is the never-ending (and let’s be honest, unanswerable) question: “What to drink?”
I’ll expand on several wine ideas over the coming weeks, but let’s set a framework with a few easy rules:
- Drink what you like. You’ll go crazy trying to match wine with food at every meal you share. Instead, find some wines you like that are also food friendly (I’ll explain how to do this next week). If you have two or three wines you can use for every event it will make your life much easier (and save your budget in the long run)
- Buy in quantity. This is also a budget saver – you generally get a discount if you purchase six or 12 bottles at a time and you won’t run the risk of having a wine be a hit at your party and you discover you only had one bottle and it’s all gone
- Experiment ahead of time. This will be fun – have a mini-tasting at home with family or friends to see what everyone likes. This may be the place to indulge the cousin who loves white zinfandel (we geeks think it’s not a serious wine, but white zin is not a bad wine at all for holiday parties and it goes well with spicy food)
- Keep an open mind! You do not need to use the most highly rated wines you’ve read about to have a great party. In fact, a lot of highly rated wines are praised for their uniqueness and are not terribly versatile. Keep your mind and your options open – after all, crowd pleasing wines please for a reason.
Next week, we’ll dig into what makes some wines so food friendly – they are the wines that will make you the star of the party, too!