Assume an early September, Saturday afternoon wedding. Average daytime temperature is in the mid-high-70’s. There will be an open bar following the ceremony from 5pm until midnight. Apparently, the venue will permit me to bring in wine for dinner and charge corkage.
How many bottles of wine would you buy for 175 people for dinner only? Normally, I’d figure 1/2 bottle/person and round up to 90-ish bottles. But with all the beer, booze, and cocktail wine, I’m thinking something like 60-72 bottles for dinner. What say you?
In the alternative, take a peek at the wine list. It may be less hassle to serve dinner wines from this list and the guests are not wine geeks. What would you choose for a white and a red? https://www.buttermilkfallsinn.com/wine-list
Always better to have too much rather than too little.
Also, if you serve bubblies - even if it’s just Prosecco - then you’re gonna zoom way past 1 bottle per head, and the guests will still be thirsting for more at the end of the evening.
For 175 people, I would want at least 130 bottles of Prosecco and 90 bottles of Chianti and 40 bottles of Moscato.
It’s just about mathematically impossible to over-estimate how much Prosecco can be guzzled by folks who are in the mood.
PS: Depending upon your zip code, you could make the obvious substitutions:
But the ratios will be similar - once you start popping the corks on the bubblies, that stuff just vanishes in the blink of an eye.
PPS: Buy wines which you actually enjoy swallowing, so that if you have four or five cases left over at the end of the evening, then, over the years, you’ll enjoy drinking your way through them.
PPPS: Serving wine properly [or even just half-heartedly] to a crowd this large is a massive logistical undertaking. To do this right, you’re gonna want about 600 stems on stand-by.
Somebody who knows & understands & devotes themselves to succeeding at large crowd logistics needs to be in charge of this - it’s not something which can be thrown together at the last minute by an amateur working part time.
[An amateur could do it working FULL TIME, for about a week solid, but not part time.]
1 white wine with salad/appetizers = 175 stems
1 red [or white] wine with main course = 175 stems
1 dessert wine [or sparkler] with wedding cake = 175 stems
The logistics of these things are simply staggering.
I’ll use my own wedding as an example. We had a fully stocked bar of cocktails and beer. Had 3 cases of white wine and 4-5 cases of red wine and 2 cases of bubbly.
148 people. Probably 30 non drinkers. The rest moderate to fairly big drinkers.
We still had at lease a case of red, a case of white and 6-7 bottles of bubbly left. We had some winos so they crushed more of the wine than I expected but for non wine folk they just had maybe half a glass and moved to beer and hard liquor.
If there’s a bar open & competing with the wine-by-the-glass, then that would definitely change the calculations.
Although in many jurisdictions, a venue might have a license for wine & beer, but no license for hard liquor.
PS: I would try to avoid a competition between wine & beer, particularly if you’re thinking about putting a great deal of sweat equity into the wine choices & then actually acquiring & hauling all the weight of that wine [plus the logistics of the stemware].
Devoting a week or two of your life to prepping the world’s greatest wedding wine dinner & then watching half the crowd head on over to the beer kegs - that would be heartbreaking.
Thank you all for your Berserker-like replies. Let me restate the question in the interest of clarity:
There will be 7 hours of hosted and unlimited full open bar (cocktails, wines of all colors and effervescence, and beers). During the middle of which we will have seated dinner and will be serving wine by the bottle in addition to all of the above.
How many bottles of wine for 175 people during dinner only?
I think my experience was somewhat similar: 3 cases each of red/white for around 120 people. Case of red left at the end along with half case of white. Beer was available too but I didn’t concern myself with such nonsense. Bubbly toast provided by the venue.