It's a Wine Party! - The 30th Birthday of Two Friends

I have always wanted to host a wine party - where my girlfriends can get together sans kiddos, bring a bottle of wine, enjoy good food (and chocolate!), and unwind a bit.  With my 30th birthday fast approaching, I wanted to do something special and knock something off of my life's to-do list.  It also happens to be my bestie's 30th birthday a week prior to mine, so why not join our birthdays and do something we both have been wanted to do for a while?

After lots of dreaming, pinning (view our pin board), planning, and googling, we came up with a menu and ideas. We would provide the food, which would be mainly finger foods and chocolate.  Our guests would bring a bottle of wine.  We would all judge the wines together and whoever's wine won the most votes would bring home a prize.

Here's how we did it:

When a guest brought in their wine, we would promptly take it and wrap it up with tissue paper and a custom designed label.  It helps having a bestie that's a talented graphic artist (Check out her FB page: Rachael Reynolds Artistry).  Be sure to write down somewhere on the bottle what it is (cab, merlot, zin, etc) and who brought it. That will help you out later.

Notice that we have also created printables that explain about the tastes of wine as well as how to taste wine.  Most of the people coming are all wine newbies, so we wanted to teach them all how to taste wine at the party.

While we were waiting for others to arrive, we had a table set up for guests to make their own wine charm.  This doubled as a help in identifying our glasses throughout the night since I don't have enough to go around as it is.  It was a great way to use up my ever-growing cork collection too.

I purchased silver head pins from the jewelry section at a craft store, bent the ends so they would "clasp" into the loop-hole.  My friend had beads galore, so we added some of that.  I sliced the corks with a sharp serated knife, they were about 1/4" thick.  I purchased little screw-in hooks, also from the jewelry section, and screwed them into each cork.  I had pre-assembled these, but left the cork blank so that everyone could make their own design.  I had some stamps and ink pads in a few different colors, but black turned out the best.  Everyone loved making them and that they could take them home!

We made lots of food.  Too much maybe, but it was GOOD.

 Foods we had were:

• Grapes
• Assorted cheeses including smoked gouda, aged white sharp cheddar, colby-jack, monterey jack
• Almonds, walnuts and mediteranean olives
• Water crackers (great palate cleanser)
• Strawberries and peaches
• Baked Brie En Croute w/ Apple Compote from Williams Sonoma
• Baked Herb Ricotta w/ Roasted Tomato Crostini from Ravishing Hunger
• Red Wine Truffles from We're not Martha blog
• Individual cheesecakes in jars w/ optional cherry topping

Everything was so good!

Notice the cute food labels, also custom-designed by my friend.  I used more of my cork collection to make the stands. I just cut a slit in the cork, stuck a tack in the back so that it would stand up, and voila!

Here are the score cards we made for the guests to fill out while we were taste-testing:

I just added up the scores after we were done and the wine with the least points (1 = Outstanding, 5 = Awful), won the prize!

The night was tons of fun, and us besties were blessed to be surrounded by family and friends and to try out lots of pinterest ideas.  :)