Kathleen Lisson: Hi, I am Kathleen and thank you for watching my video. I had a plan of wine and food pairing party. I had a really great time last Monday night, I invited about ten friends over at my house from my wine enthusiast group, and we all brought either our favorite dessert wines or our favorite desserts and mixed and matched to find out which one was the best combination for each of us. It was a really easy party to plan and it's really fun to do at your house, so I hope this video get you excited and inspired to have your own party. If you do want to have your own party, there's only a couple of steps do it.
The first one, of course, is to pick a theme. I did wines and desserts, because I love dessert, but you could also do a wine and cheese pairing party, or a wine and appetizer pairing party. The first thing to do is research either online at Google; just type in wine and food pairing or wine and cheese pairing, or go to the library, there are several books on wine and food pairing there. Decide which party you want to do and get a couple of maybe five or six combinations of wines with appropriate cheeses or desserts or appetizers, and let your friends know which wines and cheeses would be great or also give them the opportunity to come out with something special on their own.
Now when you invite your friends, figure out how many friends you can fit in your living room comfortably. I put out the invitation and two or three weeks later, it was totally full. So definitely pick which friends you want to invite and expect them all to come, because it's a really exciting party to have. The second thing to do, is to shop for the essentials about a week in advance. Go to the store, and I shopped for wine glasses, because even I don't have ten sets of wine glasses. I shopped, so I had ten champagne flutes, ten regular wine glasses and I also found these really cute little port glasses which were excellent for tasting the portified wines and the dessert wines, because they come in smaller size ports and a regular wine glass.
But either at least glasses are good for any type of wine when you are doing a tasting party. I also shopped for forks, spoons, toothpicks, plates and napkins and clean up stuff, because if I did have a wine spill, I had carpet cleaner and a whole bunch of paper towels. I also had a trash can so everyone could put their disposable things in the trash-can as well. I used a big huge trash bag, so it was much easier to clean up the day after.
I also had emptied out my fridge; the door, the bottom shelf of the door, so I could have enough space, high enough space for the wines to chill during the day, and had a little extra space in my fridge so as people brought things, I could put them in the fridge before we serve them afterwards. I also made a tasting sheet for everybody. It was just 8.5x11 sheet of paper and I listed in columns on the top, one column was all the wines that we were going to have that night, and the second column was all the desserts. So people wanted to record their impressions throughout the night. I also had enough pens so that everyone could take part if they wanted to.
Before I went to work on the night I did the party, I took the wines that I had and put them in the fridge to chill. I did buy in advance a bottle of sparkling wine from New York and uncorked it right as the first guest arrived, so everyone could have a glass of champagne as they came in. It really set a great tone to the party and since people are arriving at different times, I didn't want to start with an official wine and food pairing when not all of the guests had arrived yet.
So right after work, I uncorked almost all of the wines that I could uncork that I had. It saved a lot of time later when I was trying to serve the wines and talked to all the guests and make sure that there was enough toothpicks and everything on the table. I also cut up -- I had some pound cake and ice-cream, I brought them earlier in the week, because they were just the basic foods that would pretty much pair with any wine and also it was unpractical to ask anybody to bring ice-cream over to your house, because it would probably melt in their trunk while they were coming over. So I cut up the pound cake and other things like the pies, into small enough amount where people could just pick them up with the fork or put toothpicks in them and that will be really easy for them to just pick up a little food and taste it with the wine.
I served the wines about one every ten minutes, I went in the traditional way from white to red with my dessert wines that were right going before any of my red wines. Also, light to full bodied, and I saved the fortified wines. We did have a port and a marsala, I saved those to last. At the end of the night, I went around to everybody and asked them what their favorite pairing was. There were two sets of wines and desserts that were everybody's favorite pairing, pretty much universally, but the interesting thing was that each person also had another favorite that they may have never tried before ,but everything pretty much for every wine and dessert pairing we had, it was somebody's favorite or second favorite.
So it was a really great night, even though there were some unusual combinations that people hadn't tried before, everybody pretty much enjoyed themselves and had a lot of fun. So I helped these kids do the inspiration to host their own party and it's quick and easy, it's a lot of fun and everybody really praised about it, they all had a great time and of course, I had a great time because I got to choose and serve a lot of wines with a lot of new desserts and thank you very much for watching this video. Have a great day.
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