(StatePoint) Warm weather begs for an outdoor dinner party with good friends, delicious food, and plenty of wine. It’s all in the details to elevate a typical get together into a summer celebration feast with friends.
Here are some easy and tasteful tips to take your next summer BBQ or dinner gathering to the next level without making you, or the wine, sweat.
Don’t Run Dry
(StatePoint) Warm weather begs for an outdoor dinner party with good friends, delicious food, and plenty of wine. It’s all in the details to elevate a typical get together into a summer celebration feast with friends.
Here are some easy and tasteful tips to take your next summer BBQ or dinner gathering to the next level without making you, or the wine, sweat.
Don’t Run Dry
Acquiring the right amount of wine for your party can be challenging and you don’t want to run out before the party is over. To help determine the proper wine quantity needed, Maison Louis Jadot, specializing in quality French wines from Burgundy, offers a free online party calculator to ease the planning process: www.LoveJadot.com/mobile/party-calculator.php. Your guests will thank you for the tip in planning their own parties.
Menu Planning
A menu is not truly complete if not accompanied by complementary wines, so make sure your food and wine pairings work well together. For choosing wines that pair well with a variety of summer dishes and promise to become crowd favorites, stick with the classics. For example, Maison Louis Jadot’s Mâcon-Villages is a light and crisp Chardonnay, perfect for summer salads, lobster rolls, grilled fish, or shrimp.
For red wine loving guests, consider Maison Louis Jadot’s Beaujolais-Villages, which is a lighter style red, ideal for warm weather. Easy drinking and versatile with many different foods, your guests will have fun discovering this old world classic wine made from the Gamay varietal.
Also don’t forget to have plenty of hearty bread on hand between courses and on your appetizer table to clean guests’ palates and prepare taste buds for the next dish and wine pairing.
Décor
Create décor that wine lovers will take notice of, such as homemade place cards made of wine corks. They are simple and easy to make: save corks from old wine bottles, make a thin slit with a small knife on one side of each cork, and slide the place card inside.
To encourage guests to try your delicious food and wine pairings, prepare a chalkboard that lists out the night’s menu and guides guests to each combination. Or, help guests explore interesting pairings on their own with handwritten placards in front of each dish that includes flavor descriptions.
