Weddings are great. Everyone is in a good mood (generally), there is celebration in the air, and, best of all, the couple is surrounded by the people who make them happy. Those are the reasons I love working weddings.
I have been very fortunate to work several awesome weddings, but my favorite yet has been what I call The 36 Wine Wedding.
The brief.
Madeleine and Matt reached out to me through my website. They told me about their love of wines from New York, my home state. We connected fast over Long Island wines. The Lost Fox Inn in Connecticut, the venue they had chosen, already had a number of New York wines on the dinner service list. They liked those bottles, but they wanted something different. Very different.
They wanted thirty-six bottles of wine from around the world, with a focus on New York. Dessert wines, reds, whites, rosés, orange wines. They gave me a $1,000 budget and a brief: find thirty-six bottles worth talking about. Wines they would not have found on their own.
Two months of hunting.
Over the next two months, I visited wine stores across New York, wrote to wineries around the country about individual bottles, and tapped industry connections to track down wines you cannot find on a normal shelf.
Some standout finds:
- A 1943 Pedro Ximénez Sherry from Jerez, Spain. Beautiful and very, very sweet.
- A Zinfandel from Silenus, a now-defunct winery in Napa.
- A few older Long Island vintages: Lieb, Roanoke, Martha Clara.
- A 2007 Sauternes from France.
One bottle on the list was my wedding gift to them: a sparkling wine aged under the Mediterranean Sea, with barnacles growing on the bottle. Odd, interesting, and exactly the kind of thing I knew they would love. I worked with the importer to make sure it reached them in time for the wedding.
The night itself.
Pouring wines at weddings is my calling. It is the kind of thing that just makes me proud to do what I do. Keeping the couple's glasses filled all evening. Knowing what each guest wanted to try for a second, third, and fourth glass. Chatting with anyone who wanted to know more about each wine and producer. Making recommendations to anyone planning a future winery visit.
The 36 Wine Wedding was my favorite so far. I cannot wait to do another wedding that gives me this kind of freedom in choosing the bottles.