Dinner party tips for the wine connoisseur

Hosting a great dinner party is an art in itself that requires careful planning and skill. Dinner parties can be held for a variety of reasons. However, most people host a dinner party purely for the social aspect of dining and chatting with friends, so a good selection of wine is essential. Some dinner parties are more about the quality of the drink than the food being served, and serving a good wine is a great way to impress guests.

For this reason, it is important to have a good selection of quality wines available for guests that are kept and served correctly to get the best out of the bottle.

If you are serving fine wine, it is also important to be able to provide answers to any questions your guests might have about your selection of drinks. Do your research; learn about the region in which the wine was made, the grape varieties and its age. It is always impressive to be able to talk intelligently about a wine and explain why you picked it to go with a particular dish.

Picking a wine

Do not leave matching a wine with a dish to chance. Do your research and determine which wines go best with different foods; there are plenty of websites that provide this information for you. Order some great quality wine to match the recommendations. It really is as simple as that.

Storing wine

If you are serious about buying only the finest wines, you need to learn how to store the bottles properly. How you store your wine largely depends on the options that are available in your home. Some people will have no choice but to store wine bottles in a kitchen cupboard, while others will have a dedicated cellar constructed.

Regardless of the size of your home, it is possible to store wine in near optimal conditions if you do some research. For example, if you are storing wine in your apartment, you should really choose a closet rather than a kitchen cupboard. A closet on an outside wall tends to be cooler and will remain dark for longer periods than many kitchen cupboards.

The key to storing wine is to keep it in a relatively dark space that is cooler than average room temperature, although the most important aspect of the temperature is that it remains reasonably consistent throughout the day.

There are now some great wine storage solutions that make storing wine easy. Many wine racks are modular, which means you can easily add extra shelves to increase your storage space. If you are reasonably adept at woodwork, it is also very rewarding to build your own wine racks that fit perfectly into your chosen closet.

Decanting wine

On the day of your dinner party, you should decant your wine. This is a dying skill; in the last decade, many people have stopped decanting wine completely, instead choosing to serve directly from the bottle. The main purpose of decanting a wine is to ensure that any sediment is left in the bottle so that it does not end up in a guest’s glass.

Decanting a wine improves the taste by helping to remove the musty smell that some wines have; this is often referred to as allowing the wine to breathe. Decanting a wine also looks extremely stylish, especially if you have a fine crystal decanter.