My wife and I are having our annual wine party in just less than 2 weeks, on October 27th. I always pick a theme for the wines, and each couple brings one red wine and one white wine that fits the theme. So far, we’ve done “Anything Goes” for the first 2 years, then “US Wines Not From California”, and “Southern Hemisphere Wines Not From Australia”. This year, I decided to go mainstream, and we’re doing “French Wines”.

We do the party a bit differently than I’m told I should do wine parties. Most of our friends aren’t that into wines, so we don’t do any formal scoring. I do hand out paper for note taking, and we discuss our impression of the wines’ color, bouquet, and taste. But there are too many people to do a standard tasting, which is fine with us. I think we’re expecting 20 this year, and most advice is to limit a wine tasting party to 8. This is about fun, not being perfect. What happens is that we all get to taste a lot of different wines, and different people like different ones. We get enough to want to go try one or two wines again later. One year, someone brought this awful wine that tasted like cherry cough syrup… At least to me, and a couple of others it did. Some of our friends, and I still call them friends even after this incident, actually LIKED it! Sometimes we have to give our friends leeway to have bad taste, even if it’s really bad!

One of the things I like about this party is that all the food is made by me! People try to bring things, and I refuse any help. Any other party, that’s fine, but this one time each year, I get to decide on all the food. I try to do 2-3 meats, a couple of side dishes/appetizers and have several cheeses and bread. This year, I’ve decided to make pan seared foie gras.

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