Wine Parties.co.uk
By Christopher Tait

Community Friend were very kindly sent a Mixed Grape pack from WineParties.co.uk the following is our experience and review of the products and service.

Now wineparties.co.uk is a site that specializes in hosting blind wine tasting evenings. The idea is pretty simple. You go onto their website at www.wineparties.co.uk and order from a range of 6 different party packs. The packs have either 4 or 8 bottles of wine in them but more can be added depending on the size of your party. You then pop in a few details such as delivery address, date of party and of course payment and your wine gets shipped out to you.

The wine is couriered out to you and comes well wrapped and secure. Within the box you get your chosen number of wines - all wrapped up in strong red paper and numbered so you don't actually know the name of the wine in each bottle. You also get a host pack, corkscrew and a set of pens along with a prize for the winner. In our case the prize was a couple of bottles of wine - one white and one red.

The host pack contains details of how to host the party and how to prep for it. Details on how to taste the wine are included and it tells you what the wine boffins are doing when they have a swirl of the glass and a good sniff. You then get hints to what type of wines are wrapped up and how to identify them. You also are informed of the countries the wines are from as well as the price range for the set of wines in your box.

The game can now commence. With all your guests armed with their wine party pens, score sheets and tasting notes you can get your nose truly stuck in and start trying to work out what kind of wine is what. I'm no wine buff and it showed on the night but I could identify flavours in the wine and you soon get to know what "legs" mean in terms of wine tasting. You score points for identifying what type of wine it is and then additional points for getting the price right within 25p and the country of origin. We all felt that we could have had some clues to where different types of wine are made or their environment so we could make a more informed guess to the country of origin. I also failed miserably on the price ranges as I never know what should cost what - I can tell you the price of a pint of Becks though!

We had a good laugh in trying to identify the wines and competition between us was setting in. We were even cleansing out palettes during the rounds and having the odd snack before we started tasting again to get rid of the taste of the last wine.

It soon came to the final scores and we had a clear winner who stormed into the lead identifying a few of the bottles of wine and even spot on with the prices.

The great thing was is that we had all tried out new wines where some of us - me included - tend to stick to what we know and what is on offer too! As there was some left of each wine in the bottle we all picked out which we liked the best and put of feet up as with a glass full.

There were a couple of minor points that made the night tricky. Firstly the host pack that we were sent had the results in plain sight so when I opened it I could easily see what was what. Not that this gave me any advantage as I was rubbish! It'd be better if the results and order forms were in a separate marked envelope so no one gets to see them until after the tasting.

The second point was the order forms. We couldn't quite work them out as each had a place for the host to tick which wine they enjoyed the most. We didn't know if the host could get multiple bottle of free wine or just one. It's also be nice if you could order them in cases of 6 instead of 12 as with out pack the minimum order would have to be around £72 which is out of some peoples reach.

All in all the Community Friend team really enjoyed the wineparties.co.uk experience and it really makes for a different night. Wineparties.co.uk also do corporate events so it is well worth dropping by to www.wineparties.co.uk and seeing what they have to offer you. Get in touch with them and tell them that Community Friend sent you and we are sure you will have a great night provided by the Wine Parties team.