summer beauty

Alongside moving house, divorce and death, marriage is known to be one of the most stressful things in life.

As if this wasn’t pressure enough, your best friend had the wedding of century last year, so being the caring friend that you are, you need to beat them.

Seamless glamour doesn’t come easily, but getting the wine right is the easy part…when you know how.

Given that wine is the social lubricant, the glue, the juice that can make or break your special day more than any other factor, including torrential rain, there can’t be any messing about.

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You’re not consciously looking for this wedding to be the dry-run for your next, so the stakes are high to get it right.

For some reason though, the wine is usually relegated to a panicked phone call or a high-importance email pinged into my Inbox a month before the event.

The brief is nearly always, ‘find something amazing, that costs nothing’. No pressure then…

On a positive note, these last-minute requests have given me a superpower for finding wines that taste the bomb, without costing one. It’s all about appealing to the masses, knowing your audience, anticipating their drinking capabilities and sticking to a budget.

Much of it is down to common sense, if the invitee list is heavily made up of parents with young kids, imminent mothers or teetotallers, go lighter on the alcohol, literally.

If, on the other hand, you’re one of the first in your friendship group to get hitched, you might want to look at multiplying everything by two…and then some.

As a rule of thumb, it’s best to work on the per-head basis of two glasses of fizz and half a bottle of wine. If you’re planning on throwing a party afterwards, best save yourself the stress and opt for a Sale or Return service like the one Majestic and other retailers offer.

For the trickier question of the wines themselves, the more crowd-pleasing, the better. Now is not the time to challenge people with unusual styles, but to give them what they want in the form of zesty whites and fleshy reds.

So, whether it’s the groom’s ‘one job’, or a team effort, here are my tips for nailing the wedding wine selection:

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