Tannic Panic! Issue #52: How to Pick Great Wine for Your Wedding (on a Budget)

This past weekend, Isaac got married. Needless to say, good wine was an important consideration, but so was budget. Here's how we went about it and what we picked.

What’s poppin’ you pack of perpetually parched winos?

This past weekend, Isaac got married. 🥳🕺🍷

Needless to say, serving good wine was an important consideration, and like all weddings not thrown by billionaires, so was budget.

So this week’s post is all about how we went about picking our wines, and what we ultimately went with.

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Everyone will have their own “must-haves” list for their weddings, and a lot of these are based on personal preferences/things that specifically apply to the couple in question (for us these were finding a dog-friendly venue and a kick ass plant-based caterer), but one thing no wedding should be without is a great wine list.

Now, there are many things along the way that can throw a wrench in that need. For one thing, many venues require you to go with their preferred vendors, and in so many cases, we found that they had pre-selected wine lists. Believe me when I tell you exactly ZERO of these were acceptable wines. Even their “premium” packages, which required an exorbitant investment, offered middling wines as their top-shelf bottles.

For us, this meant that we needed to find both a venue that allowed us to pick our own vendors, and a bar service that allowed us to provide our own alcohol. It may take a little extra research, but it was totally worth it.

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Things to Keep in Mind When Shopping

• Guest count — The last thing you want is to run out of alcohol or wine for your guests, so you’ll need to do some calculations to determine what the amount to purchase for your count will be. There are several online calculators that can help with this, or you can ask your bar service to help you determine how much you’ll need for your guest count (which is what we did). We over-ordered on reds, but got down to the last bottle on white by the end of the night. What do you do with the extra wines? Well, that’s one reason to love them yourself — you’ll have leftovers you would want to drink anyway — but the next consideration will help you out if you don’t want to keep the extras.

• Retailer — In our area (Austin, TX), there are several retailers that actually allow returns (in some cases with a restocking fee usually around ~10%). Total Wine is one of these (may vary by location, so check) and so is Specs. We bought everything from Total Wine, so we have the option of returning the left over bottles. Larger retailers will often allow you to do this, so ask about the ones near you!

• Climate — When deciding which wines to over-index on, keep in mind that climate will be a factor. We live in a hot area and got married in a warmer time of year, so people gravitated towards refreshing beverages. This meant higher consumption of whites and sparkling throughout the event. In a cooler climate, you may see more red consumption.

• What you want to offer — We went with 2 reds (one easier drinking, the other optimized for pairing), 1 white (great solo and proven to pair well with our menu), 1 sparkling (for general consumption and enough to pour for a toast with all guests). We opted not to offer a rosé because it scratches a similar itch to white wine (refreshing and chilled), and we were looking for ways to be budget and space conscious. You’ll want to pick a spread that fits in with your night. For example, you may only want to get enough sparkling for the toast, which cuts the amount of bottles you’ll need to get down significantly. If there is no “Champagne” toast, then you may decide to eliminate sparkling entirely, or just get enough for the guests who want to order it from the bar.

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Pro-tip: It’s important to keep in mind that for sparkling, white, and rosé (and even some reds), they are best served chilled, which means that for every bottle you get you’ll need to make sure you have cooler or fridge space available. If you don’t, it will require a lot more work to rotate the room temperature bottles in throughout the night to get them cool enough to serve.

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Weddings can be an incredibly expensive “endeavor,” with the average cost in the United States reaching over $30,000 in “recent years.” While the need to cut costs wherever possible is understandable, the wine served at your wedding is an area where it's often worth investing a bit more (IN OUR UNREALISTICALLY UNBIASED OPINION). The quality of the wine you choose for a wedding can literally make or break the “experiences and precious memories” of your “thirsty guests” on your “special day.”

But fear not — investing a bit more time in selecting the bottles, can save you lot more money when it comes time to pull the trigger. So, after going through the process of doing this ourselves, here is our little guidebook for how to pick wines for your wedding.

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Preparing to Pick the Wines

Let’s start with the preliminaries…

First of all, you need at least a rough sense of what your total wine budget will be. Unless you’re ruthlessly wine-centric, this will most likely be some fraction of your total alcohol/bar budget, so be sure to keep that in mind.

Next, you’ll want to decide what kinds of wine you want to serve in the broadest sense. We wanted to have red, white, and sparkling. We opted not to serve rosé because we were fairly tight on budget and wanted to make sure we had enough apportioned for the wines we wanted in the other categories.

Then, you’ll need to determine how many bottles of each of those styles you’ll need based upon your guest count. As mentioned in our “Things to keep in mind when shopping” section, there’s a few ways to get a sense of that, including useful online calculators, or guidance from a pro (like your bartending service). Once you’ve done each of these things, you’ll be able to estimate your budget per bottle.

It’s important to note that the quality level for certain types of wine will be generally higher at lower price points.

Great white wines will be easier to find on a budget than reds or sparkling, for example. For this reason, your budget per bottle may not be consistent across the board.

Our budget per bottle ultimately broke down as follows:

Red: ~$13

White: ~$11

Sparkling: ~$15

Now I’ll point out that we didn’t go into it knowing that those numbers would be the exact costs for each of these things, but we did know we wanted to keep the average for everything under ~$15/bottle (for a guest count of a little over 100).

If you have a smaller guest count and are working under less budgetary constraint, you may consider raising the budget (especially on the reds) to expand your options.

If you’ve read past Tannic Panic! posts (like our piece on mass market reds, or really just any of our value red topics) you already know that finding great quality red wines for cheap is tricky, made especially more so by the overabundance of manufactured swill mixed in with the gems out there.

It is not, however, impossible.

Let’s move onto the next step of actually selecting the bottles…

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Picking the Wines

The 4 wines we offered at the wedding

First of all, it is prudent to apportion a small budget towards trying bottles you may want to serve. You know your budget per bottle, I’d recommend being prepared to buy up to ~10 bottles that fit within your budget to find the right one for you.

In our case, we already knew where to look for value wines in each category, and had tasted many in the past (one of the perks of writing a value wine blog), but we still tasted through at least 10 different bottles of red before settling on the right option.

Whites were easier, as outstanding examples are much easier to find in the under $15 category, so you probably won’t have to shop around as much.

We viewed sparkling as a little different, in that we knew we could find refreshing and nice examples that are very easy drinking in our price range, but finding very complex and layered examples (at least here in the U.S.) for $15 or less is not easy (if even possible), so we cut ourselves a little slack and just picked one that we knew was dry, refreshing and tasted nice.

One very important consideration here is going to be how the wine goes with your food (and, of course, how it goes without your food).

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Pro-tip: Bring your wine candidates to the menu tasting. When we did our catering tasting to iron out the menu for our wedding, we brought a handful of bottles with us and tasted them alongside each dish. As a result, we were able to lock in our white wine option, and eliminate a few red bottles that were in the running. I can’t recommend strongly enough that you do this as well — the best way to know how something will pair is *SHOCKER* by tasting the pairing yourself.

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We’ll drop links to reviews of the bottles we actually selected in the next section, but for now let’s look out our approach to picking them:

White Wine

For our white wine option, we knew we wanted something that tasted great on its own, as well as worked for pairing. Us Tannic Panickers have the advantage of having exposure to large numbers of bottles at lower price points, so we had a good sense of where to start. Initially, we looked at a handful of New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc (which this post and this post will both tell you are exceptional sources of value), and some dry Italian whites (specifically Soave).

We were looking at the two options because they are stylistically different in some ways (comparatively, Soave is a little more restrained, less tropical, a bit lower acid, while NZ sauv blanc is intensely flavored, with more tropical fruit character, some green notes and vibrant acidity), yet they share the most important characteristics of working well with a variety of food dishes as well as being delicious on their own.

After tasting how well the outstanding 2022 Grove Mill Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc went with our dishes, we decided that we would limit our white options to that single bottle. Had we offered both the Soave (2022 Montresor Soave Classico was the front-runner within our budget) and the Grove Mill, then we would have had half as much budget for the Grove Mill, and when it came down to it, we simply thought the Grove Mill was a better wine. Arguments could be made either way, and having optionality probably won’t draw complaints from your guests, but they may be disappointed if the wine they prefer runs out! (We certainly would be)

Red Wine

For our red wine options, we wanted something structured and high acid for food pairing and something that matched our cuisine choice, all while offering high value at a relatively low price. We also wanted a very easy drinking, slightly less structured red for people who didn’t gravitate towards the aforementioned style (but one that also worked with the food we were serving). In this case, we decided splitting budget between two styles was worth it. We got a smaller number of the “easy drinking” bottles as they were more expensive and ultimately less geared towards our own taste. Our picks were the 2022 Vasco Sasseti “Il Ginepro” Rosso Toscano IGT (Sangiovese), and the 2021 Dolia Cannonau di Sardegna. If you’ve been with us for a while, you know that Tuscany is a great source of value, and produces some great food friendly wines. Though it is less structured and lower acid, Cannonau also goes very well with certain types of cuisine, especially garlicky foods and red sauces (we served a plant-based meatball dish in red sauce as one of the dinner options).

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DID YOU KNOW… Cannonau is thought to be a local Sardinian clone of the Grenache grape. In Sardinia, which is considered one of the world's five "Blue Zones" (regions with the highest concentrations of people over 100 years old), the local Cannonau wines are thought to play a significant role in longevity. Cannonau contains 2-3 times the level of “artery-scrubbing flavonoids” contained in most other wines, a feature attributed to the “harsh” Sardinian sun.

So, as a bonus, even if people hated the wine, at least we did them a favor.

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Pro-tip: When shopping for reds, depending on your budget, you may want to avoid wines from regions where the overhead cost of production is inherently higher. Some places in the “New World,” like California, can have much higher costs because unlike old estates in Italy and France, the land has not been passed down for generations and is still being paid off. Those costs are passed down to the consumer, so when you find a “steal” from California (in the under $20 category), corners have often been cut to discount the bottle for you. This can mean additives like Megapurple, flavor additives, sugar, and other stuff that seriously impact the overall quality of the wine. If you’re set on value Cali reds under $20, check out this post!

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Sparkling Wine

We went with a dry (Brut), traditional method sparkling from California, the Mumm Napa Brut Prestige. This can vary in price depending on time of year and where it is being sold, but we were able to find it at around $15 a bottle, and it was just what we were looking for. We wanted a traditional method sparkling wine (read more about sparkling styles here) to emulate Champagne for our “Champagne” toast (real Champagne was not an option within our budget), so we looked at Cap Classique (South African traditional method sparkling), Cava (Spanish tradish sparkling), and some traditional method sparkling options from California. We tasted numerous that would have worked for us, but ultimately settled on the Mumm. Regardless of what your preference is, be it a Traditional Method style bottle, or something in the vein of Prosecco, our recommendation is to go with something dry and high acid (not to the point of being out of balance), because they are refreshing and likely to go well with all manner of dishes.

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Pro-tip: If you taste your wines far in advance, you may have to account for a potential change in vintage (and thus potential change in quality & profile) occurring in stores between the tasting and the wedding. It’s therefore important to keep in mind that, depending upon the date of your wedding & the hemisphere from which the wine originates, you might have a limited time frame for purchasing your wines once you’ve tried them.

We also recommend storing of your white wines at a lower temperature (especially whites meant to be drunk shortly after bottling) because they are more adversely affected by oxidation (though proper storage for all your wines is important to ensure they taste the way they did when you tasted them as your selection). For that reason, if you are hosting a large group, you may need to taste & purchase the bottles closer to the date of the wedding for the sake of space. (Our fridge space was fully monopolized by Grove Mill for several months before the wedding 😬)

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Non-Alcoholic Wine & Wine Alternatives

We offered 2 non-alcoholic wines at the wedding - the shockingly delicious Good Twin Sparkling and the similarly surprising Magic Box Vanish Riesling (as well as a few bottles of Martinelli’s Sparkling Apple Juice, which of course is a hit with the kids).

For the de-alcoholized bottles, we only bought 2 bottles of each (and we had almost all of it left over at the end), but knowing we had some non-drinkers at the wedding, we felt it would be nice to offer them something in case they went in that direction.

If you want our suggestions for the best de-alcoholized options to include on your wedding list (or just to enjoy yourself), you should check out this post!

Tannic Panic! Issue #34: Prohibition is BACK (For 31 Days)

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Rentals

At some point (if your caterer or bar service doesn’t provide these) you’ll have to deal with selecting rentals for your drinks. We kept it simple.

We opted to offer just one kind of wine glass for still wines, a 16oz glass in the Bordeaux glass shape (our rental company called them “Cabernet Wine Glasses”) and those were great for both reds and whites, as they were stemmed (especially important for white wines as the heat from your palms can warm the wine), and had curved sides that allowed for enjoying the aromatics. If you are operating on a larger budget, you may consider getting glasses particularly suited for certain styles of wine, but it certainly isn’t a necessity.

We did standard 6oz champagne flutes for the sparkling, we would definitely recommend going this direction over coupe glasses or any wider bowl glasses, if for no other reason than that pouring the sparkling for your guests can take a long time (it took about 30 minutes to pour everyone a glass for the toast) and wider bowls will more quickly lose their bubbles (AND FEW THINGS IN LIFE ARE WORSE THAN LOSING YOUR BUBBLES).

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Special Wines for Smaller Groups

For events during and around the wedding with smaller groups (like the rehearsal dinner, friends & family getting ready with the bride and groom pre-wedding, and the Champagne toast for the bride and groom’s table, etc.) you may want to have something special picked out, which could merit a higher budget.

For these, it’s a matter of just picking for your tastes and of course following more or less the same process of scaling your total budget to match the number of people consuming.

Here’s what we did:

Rehearsal dinner (ours was the 15 immediate family members including the couple getting married), we drank red wine (2 exceptional bottles that Zach gifted to the cause - a 2013 Salvatore Moletierri Vigna Cinque Querce Taurasi and the incredible 2018 Domaine Des Tourettes Delas Hermitage which we scored higher than anything else we’ve reviewed since launching the blog), white wine (we just went with the Grove Mill here because it’s that good, dammit), and 2 bottles of Champagne for some toasts (we found an outstanding value Champagne at total wine for around $35-40 - the De Saint-Gall 'Le Tradition' Premier Cru Brut Champagne).

Isaac demonstrating the extreme drinkability of Grove Mill with class

Getting ready the morning of the wedding, we picked options that are low stain risk to be safe (wouldn’t want to screw up our nicest suits and dresses by spilling red wine!). We had more of the De Saint-Gall Champagne, a couple of bottles of Louis Bouillot Perle De Vigne Cremant De Bourgogne Brut Sparkling, and the awesome Romana Sancerre Pinot Noir Rose (which we reviewed here). This event required a very small number of bottles, just enough to keep the friends happy while we hung around getting ready for pictures and the like.

Champagne Toast at the table of the couple getting married, we stashed a bottle of ~real Champagne~ to open up and share with a few friends at our table. We went with the Nicolas Feuillatte Brut Reserve Champagne (reviewed here), which is another favorite of ours in the under $40 category.

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We hope this little breakdown of our process has been helpful! If you (or someone you know and love) is suffering from severe to moderate getting married syndrome, first of all CONGRATULATIONS, and second of all, please feel free to slide in our DMs if you have any more questions or need some suggestions for what to pick out.

After all, we live to serve.

Until next time, HAPPY DRINKING PEOPLE!

Cheers!

Isaac & Zach