A Peek Into Our Lives: Blind Wine Tasting Party

We threw a foppish, pretentious party. Party dresses and suits and everything. We even went as pretentious as we could with the food — shrimp cocktail, caviar (bleugh), individually wrapped chocolates, bite-sized quiche, lots of cheeses...




We're so classy that we chilled bottles of wine and sparkling cider in both a broken styrofoam cooler and the crock pot. Only the best for our guests!
We didn't wrap those, but we did make a few people sample them because they are my favorite wines ever.

We didn't come up with the blind tasting concept, but it's pretty brilliant. The idea is for everyone to bring an inexpensive bottle of wine (or sparkling cider, for the non-alcohol-drinkers), and all bottles are wrapped up to be anonymous and re-labeled R1, R2, W1, W2, N1, N2, etc. Well, I would have named them in that order, but the husband subscribed to a more free-form version in which he used the right letter, but then just randomly chose a number he was certain was bigger than the last one. So we ended up with R1, R2, R3, R22, R47, and R99. The Ws didn't fare much better.

You'll never guess what kind of wine this is!


This served a dual purpose: one, it's what we kept the prizes in so the cats wouldn't eat the ribbons before the party. Anyone with cats can tell you that ribbons are among the tastiest items ever manufactured. Two, if someone didn't dress up, we were going to give them a fashionable accessory.


We also had comment cards for people to share any opinions they had and a rating on a scale of 0-5. (In one version the scale was from "Made of Nightmares" to "Dreams Come True" and in another, "Mad Dog" to "Distilled Happiness") Toward the end of the night, the Other tallied up the ratings and selected the favorites in each category and we handed out prizes to whomever brought those favorites.


Then we had some prizes for comments themselves.
• Most Pretentious went to the person who left a comment of "Lovely full flavor with an oh-so-unfortunate aftertaste" and rated it a 3.85. Mostly because of the numerical rating. 3.85? That's pretty darn specific.
• Most Blue Collar went to the person that said, "It'll get you drunk," signed it as Sam Jackson and added, "P.S. Still drinking it."
• Most Amusing went to the guy who's comment had no words, just a sad face.

I didn't manage to take any picture of the party itself, but it was a success. We had a great mix of social circles, military and civilian, workmate and internet-met friend. Everyone met someone new, and almost all the bottled wine was consumed. We still have both boxes (one red, one zin), but that will disappear in good time. Anyone who comes over is welcome to help...