Now I’ve got you thinking, haven’t I. All that lovely fizz and we haven’t even started talking about the meal.
But just how much wine should you buy for your wedding guests?
If you’re organising a meal via a hotel they will advise you, but if you’re planning a DIY wedding in a church hall or a garden with a marquee, then the numbers game is down to you.
As a rule of thumb you could expect to get seven, even eight, decent pours of fizz out of a 75cl bottle, using flute glasses.
If you’re nervous, practise at home with an empty sparkling wine bottle, topped up with water. (It’s fun emptying the bottle of its fizz ahead of this scientific experiment).
Pour the water into a champagne flute, tip it out, and then repeat until the bottle is empty. Keep count of how many pours you can get.
Then decide how many glasses you would want to provide for your wedding guests (think at least two – one for the drinks reception after the wedding service and another for the toasts). It’s your decision if you want guests to have more fizz at the reception, but one glass is probably fine for the toasts.
As for the main meal, then you’d probably need a little more red or white wine per person. Six glasses per bottle is a good rule of thumb – you could do the empty wine bottle and water trick, pouring into normal wine glasses, not flutes, to have confidence in how much you think you might need.
Then work out how many people you have at the wedding and how many glasses of wine you’d like them to have as they share the wedding breakfast with you.
If you have six people on a table, then one bottle of wine will comfortably serve them a glass each. If you want them to have two glasses each, then you’d need two bottles and so on.
Here’s an extra thought – if I’m running a wine tasting I’d allow for ten small pours out of a bottle of wine. If you have tables of 10, then three bottles would give each person three small glasses of wine each; four bottles would provide four small glasses each.
Remember the water and bottle trick? Have a practice!
If you are planning or helping someone to plan their wedding watch this blog next week when we will be publishing Part 3: Which red and white wines to serve at your wedding meal
Jane Clare is a wine columnist, blogger and member of the Circle of Wine Writers. Find her as One Foot in the Grapes on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
