The Crocodile Cage

• Wine Glasses
• Customized Champagne Flutes
• Etched Wine Glasses
• Wine Accessories
• Custom Etched Wine Glasses
• Champagne Glasses in Bulk
• Custom Wine Glasses
• Wine Gifts
• Engraved Wine Glasses
• Personalized Wine Glass

While wine experts disagree about many things, they almost unanimously agree that the best way to enjoy a bottle of wine is with friends. Whether it’s a quiet evening spent on the patio, or a large-scale wine tasting event, the company is more important than the wine.

When you’re hosting guests, it’s fun to add a little color and flavor to the evening with wine and refreshments of course, but also with decorations and even planned activities to help keep everyone entertained and interacting with one another. For an event featuring wine, wine related activities work well.

Wine tasting can be an event unto itself, with just a few bottles of wine and some glasses. However, adding note pads for the tasters to record their remarks and then compare notes can make it even more fun. If you mask off the labels on the wine bottles, you can have each taster guess the variety, region and year and turn it into a game. The person with the most correct answers wins a small prize.

With any wine tasting, you’ll want a variety of small food bites to both cleanse the palate and to highlight particular wines. A variety of bite size cheese cubes will complement many of the white wines, while richer foods such as chocolate or a bit of roast beef will bring out the character of a full-bodied red. In between wines, a simple toast or cracker can help cleanse the palate and prepare your guests for the next vintage.

In a true wine tasting, you’ll only pour a smidgeon of each wine for each guest. If you are tasting five or six wines, that’ll be plenty and you don’t want your guests falling down on the way out at the end of the evening. You might pour perhaps an inch of wine into each glass. That’s enough to allow guests to see the color and clarity of the wine, enjoy the bouquet, and have enough to fully sample the flavor.

Because there may be so many glasses floating around the room, it’s a good idea to place wine glass charms on each glass to help your guests identify their own glass throughout the evening. Wine glass charms are little decorative rings that fit over the stem of the glass. Each one in the set will have a unique color or design that makes it easy to tell them apart. In fact, wine glass charms should be used at any large gathering where the guests are moving their drinks around the room to avoid those awkward discussions of is this mine or yours?

Whatever the excuse you use, getting together with friends and having a good time is the goal. Enjoying a few nice wines with them is just a bonus.