My sisters wedding is on next month, and the menfolk of the clan have been tasked with the wine.
I’m going to explain how we are doing it, in the hopes that the information might be helpful to others in a similar situation.
Firstly, the wedding itself. You need to make plans.
Will you have drinks as people arrive? a toast during the meal? how much wine will you provide during the meal?
For our family wedding – It’s an irish one, being held in a Castle! There’s a punch reception on arrival. There will be a “champagne” toast during the meal and my parents want to have enough wine on hand to keep everyone’s glass full during the meal. So now we know we need to cater for fizzy stuff and white/red wines. The hotel has provided a wine list, and the corkage fees, which helps us to figure out a budget.
Armed with this, we now have three shopping venues in mind. Firstly, the foreign trip. We take a couple of shoping trips to France each year, so we’re familiar with shopping for wine abroad. We considered buying the wedding wine abroad but decided against it. There’s always a chance that something might go wrong, and with a remote purchase the chances to fix problems can be too small.
The day of our failed booze cruise I spoke to a lady in the queue who had a pallet of wedding wine waiting for her to collect in Roscoff!
The other two options we have are local. Bubble Brothers and Curious Wines are two local wine sellers, based in the Marina in town and Bandon, respectively. Both are open to the public as well as having websites and both offer a wedding service. With the foreign option off the list, we went to visit both
establishments to solicit advice, and collect samples for tasting.
We started in Bubble Brothers, as they’re closer. We called in and spoke with Julian. We explained the situation, the numbers of guests, tried to explain the sort of people (categorising white or red basically) and totally forgot to tell him what was on the menu (I confess we didn’t know). He explained some rules of thumb for amounts of wine – one bottle between two people and so on. We worked out the amount we were willing to spend, taking corkage in the hotel into account and this gave us a rough budget. With some more helpful advice we picked out some samples for white, red and fizzy.
Into the car and on we went to Curious Wines in Bandon. There we met Matt, and went through the same dialogue. This time we were a little more prepared for the sort of information the wine shops need to provide the best feedback. Again, we bought possibles for the wedding.
At this point, we need to chose the wines, negotiate prices and figure out delivery.
In part two, I’ll detail the samples we took.
Sneak preview:
Bubble Brothers:
Curious Wines:
Interesting, We’re planning our own wedding – and it’s good to get some ideas, Will be interested to read part 2
Hi,
congratulations on the upcoming wedding!
part 2 should be along in a half hour or so.
You’re doing everyone a service by covering the tricky business of choosing wedding wine from the customer’s perspective – I should think that most wine shops offer broadly similar recommendations, but we very rarely get to see the decision-making process unfold.
Whatever the decisions, I’m looking forward to part 2 too.
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