6 Fun Themes for Your Wine Tasting Party

If you want to host a wine tasting party and have no idea where to begin, then just relax and realize that there're plenty of wine tasting themes around that 'll practically guarantee a successful party. These parties are fun and relatively easy to prepare and host. So before you begin, take some time to select a theme. The following are 6 selected themes to consider for your party.

First is called Horizontal Tasting. For this type of theme, you'll focus only on a single wine type from one individually selected year. Even so, each wine variety may come from different vineyards and producers. For instance, you can concentrate on a year 2003 Chardonnay from four to 6 wineries and wine producers.

Here, consider whether you'd prefer to sample wine from the exact same region or whether to mix tasting of the same kind but coming from several wineries from Italy, California or Australia, for example.

The second theme is Vertical Tasting. In this theme, wine tasting also centers on just one type of wine but with the same producer. For instance, you may only focus on sampling the Chardonnay from the same producer. But the wines will be different years or vintages. For example, you may taste a Chardonnay from a cellar from 2000, 2004 and 2006. This'll show your guests how striking or demur a wine may vary from year over year.

Priceless Tasting

This is yet another outstanding wine sampling party idea. Let's not forget that people usually assume that the more expensive wine tastes better than the cheapest. While this is probably more true than not, you can sample test palates by hiding the prices of the wines available. Just by tasting, your guests may learn which wine is worth 150 dollars vs. which one is worth just 20 dollars.

Price Point Tasting

The fourth wine tasting theme is one where the featured wines will all have the same or very close pricing. The objective here is to hold the wines to a comparable baseline pricing yet flexible enough to organize them when purchasing the wine.

Blind Tasting

Here, the theme requires that you remove all the labels from the wine bottles or place them into wine bags. your guests your guests have no idea as to the wine they're tasting, so it'll certainly be interesting to know the kind of wine they like without seeing the wine's label or the price.

Big Eight Tasting

In this theme, you'll allow your guests to sample 8 very different varieties of wine as they decide which one(s) most favored. This also gives your guests, especially those who are not "into" unfamiliar wines, a higher level of discernment for different types of wine. The big 8 wines are Merlot, Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Pinot Noir for the red wines, and Chardonnay, Riesling, and Pinot Grigio among others for the white wines.