Drink to Wedded Success
When it comes to choosing your wine & champagne for your wedding toasts, the choice can seem overwhelming, particularly if you’re no wine buff! Never fear, Richard Neill can offer you all the advice you will need to make an informed choice.
The following is an extract taken from Booze by Richard Neill, published by Cassell & Co.
For most brides- and grooms-to-be, the wedding reception is nothing less than Nightmare On Catering Street: a shocking tale of booze management involving a large, thirsty cast of different ages and social groups who have come together for the sole purpose of getting lagered up at your expense. The true extent of the calamity you are facing only becomes apparent after all the other trivial but expensive challenges (dress, marquee, food) have been ticked off the list. Suddenly, you find yourself with a budget of ?￡1000 to keep 100 people well lubricated for at least six hours, and you know there are at least 10 wine snobs, 15 sweet-toothed grannies, a couple of vegans and two Orthodox Jews who won’t touch anything that isn’t kosher.
The chances of you hitting the bottle before buying a bottle are extremely high. But don’t panic just yet. I always remember the calming words someone gave me just before I stood up to nervously deliver a best man’s speech: “Remember, everyone is here to have a good time – they want to like you and laugh at your jokes”. The same applies to the booze you supply: everyone will be so busy getting high on the feel-good factor that all gastronomic quality-control buttons will pretty much be switched off for the day. I’ll bet you could pour some cheap Bulgarian cabernet into a bunch of decanters and no one would a) notice something was wrong, or b) complain if they did. And finally, a tip for all you budding brides and grooms out there, instead of setting up the usual boring clich??d wedding list for yourselves – you know the sort of thing: one toaster, four pillows, a cutlery set and a matching pair of cuddly toys – why not find a wine merchant who will set up a far more interesting liquid list? You get a wine collection that would normally take years to accumulate, and your friends can buy something that seems just a little bit more meaningful than a set of carving knives.
Champagne
The British might have been putting bubbles into wine before the French, but it is the latter who have turned fizzy wine into one of the most successful commercial ventures in the world. Almost every wedding couple gets toasted with it, every sporting hero gets doused in it, every boat gets launched with it and every business deal gets sealed with it.
More than any other type of wine, champagne is about feeling good. It’s about status and brand loyalty (“I only drink Cristal, dahling”), and about drinking rather than analyzing. Compared with the scrutiny given to claret and burgundy, you’ll find far fewer tasting notes scribbled about champagne. There might be a brief recognition of how dry and acidic it is and how fine the beads of bubbles are, but there is rarely great deliberation over the minutiae of flavor. Ask what people love about it and most (of the honest ones) will say something like, “It makes my tongue tingle, my head giddy and my mood extremely positive”.
But is there really such a big difference between one brand and another, and between the cheap stuff and the mega-priced super cuv??es? Yes and no. At the bottom end of the market, I find it hard to distinguish one bottle of green, raw acidity from another; they all trigger the same Mr. Bean-style facial expressions and they all taste better with a dash of cassis. At the other end of the scale, the investment does pay off. Acidity is gentler and more rounded, flavors are richer and nuttier, and bubbles are finer and longer-lasting. Instead of a ham-fisted, frothy massage, top champagne feels more like delicate oral acupuncture.
Buying advice
Good sparkling wine tastes far nicer than cheap champagne. One bottle of decent vintage champagne is better than two nasty non-vintages and special cuv??es are a waste of money.
Sparkling Wine
The sparkling-wine brigade has the massive hurdle of trying to persuade you to look past the inferiority complex attached to its wines. No matter how you say it, sparkling wine just doesn’t sound as good as the classy “sshhh” of champagne. And that’s exactly how the men of Reims and Epernay like it. You can use their equipment, copy their methods, steal some of their staff, but if your little co2 experiment didn’t take place in Champagne, you can’t legally call it champagne.
Sparkling wine varies enormously in quality and price. The cheapest bulk productions offer something that tastes and feels like wine shoved through a SodaStream machine. The best can fool even the most determined of experts in blind tasting. As with property values, the most important thing is location, location and location. If you can find places where the grapes really have to struggle to ripen and where ripeness comes with bracing acidity attached, you might just stand a chance of achieving the elegance, power and sharp-edged structure found in the Bolingers, Veuve Clicquots and Dom P??rignons of this world.
Today, the highest-quality sparkling wines come from the cooler regions of Australia (Tasmania and Yarra Valley), New Zealand, California and – no, this isn’t a printing error – England. With its chalk soils and long growing season, England has probably the greatest chance of beating the champenois at their own game. It may take another couple of decades of trial and error, investment and global warming, but the chances of a champagne house hopping across the channel to make sparkling wine are increasing every vintage.
Buying advice
Sparkling wines made by champagne companies (Mumm, Domaine Chandon, Roederer), English sparkling wine (Nyetimber, South Ridge).
The dos of wedding boozea?|
Do buy in advance. Most weddings are announced months ahead of the date, so if it’s a summer wedding buy your booze in the January sales. Do buy the best sparkling wine you can rather than the cheapest champagne you can afford. Most big-brand premium sparkling wines are far better quality than those at the bottom rung of the champagne prom proposal ideas
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Do serve your fizz from big bottles. Sure, size doesn’t matter, but pulling out a methuselah doesn’t half impress the in-laws – and it saves having to open eight smaller bottles.
Do behave like a restaurateur and serve wines that your guests won’t recognize. If you put well-known brands on the table, they’ll all be able to work out exactly how much you’ve spent on them.
Do go for new world rather than old world wines. Not only will they be more reliable, but their sweeter fruit flavors will go down better with the oldies, saving you the hassle of offering an off-dry option as well.
a?| and the don’ts
Don’t feel ashamed about hiring a van and heading off to the nearest bulk-booze warehouse, but do be careful not to buy bootleg material. Policemen storming into the marquee tend to be a bit of an atmosphere-killer.
Don’t serve different wines on the top table. It will only spark off more bitterness among those relations and friends who didn’t make the cut.
Don’t provide spirits unless you’re prepared for the marquee to be dismantled before the wedding has finished.
Don’t forget to lock your own cellar door, or the door to wherever you’re keeping your own private supply. Believe me, when your guests are drunk, they still somehow always manage to find prom proposal ideas
.
Georgina Clatworthy is a dedicated full time writer who composes informative articles related to wedding favors and wedding. She is connected with 1weddingsource.com, today’s leading wedding planning social networking site.
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