How much wine do I need?

Knottie10724897

We are having a 100 person wedding (rough estimate - 120 were invited). In order to save some money, we are able to provide our own wine for the cocktail hour/dinner/reception. Beer and liquor will also be available to our guests but we are having to use the resort's beer and liquor at their prices since they do not allow that to be brought in. Only wine. So my question is, based on having approximately 100 people at the reception, how many bottles of wine will I need? I've looked at different sites but that seems to be based on ONLY having wine..we will be having a full bar available. Any recommendations based on experience?

Side note: I know this will get asked - yes we are paying for all alcohol for our guests. 

Thanks!! 

southernbelle0915

Knottie10724897 said:

We are having a 100 person wedding (rough estimate - 120 were invited). In order to save some money, we are able to provide our own wine for the cocktail hour/dinner/reception. Beer and liquor will also be available to our guests but we are having to use the resort's beer and liquor at their prices since they do not allow that to be brought in. Only wine. So my question is, based on having approximately 100 people at the reception, how many bottles of wine will I need? I've looked at different sites but that seems to be based on ONLY having wine..we will be having a full bar available. Any recommendations based on experience?

Side note: I know this will get asked - yes we are paying for all alcohol for our guests. 

Thanks!! 

It entirely depends on whether you have a beer crowd, a mixed drink crowd or a wine crowd. If it's pretty evenly split, imagine 40 wine drinkers (better to go on total invited and have leftover). You can usually count on 2 drinks in the first hour and one drink every hour after that. Ask the venue if they do 4oz pours or 5oz pours. 5oz is pretty typical especially for a celebratory event, which is about 5 glasses per bottle.

So with a 4 hour reception, 5oz pours and an event split beer/liquor/wine crowd, I would buy 40 bottles of wine. How you break out red and white is a know your crowd thing. 

I would strongly advise overbuying - it sounds like you'll be able to keep the leftovers. We had our caterer buy a certain kind of wine we had the night we got engaged. We wayyyy over estimated how much we'd need. Since we got to keep all the unopened bottles, we have had a lot of fun breaking them out on special occasions.

Knottie10724897

Yes, I think you're right that it's better to overbuy. And you're right - we'll get to keep whatever we don't use. We're literally going to be buying the bottles at the liquor store(s) ourselves - so especially if we go to a place like Costco, we'd be able to return any unopened bottles (but...what fun is returning them? ). We'll probably just save them for special occasions...or just a Tuesday night!  

southernbelle0915

Tuesday nights ARE special. I like the way you think!

ScottishSarah

We pre-ordered the following for 60 adult drinking guests...  like you we had a bar for other drinks.  (Goes off to dig out final invoice)

32 Prosecco  
18 White (2 types)
24 Red

We used all the pre-ordered prosecco and had to order extra on the day.  We had loads of red left (it was a really good quality one) so we gave some bottles to departing guests.  The venue gathered up all the half drank bottles from the tables for me but there were way to many for me to take home so I just took a couple of the mostly full ones. 

We did have a fair bit of waste as we put a decent amount on each table but of course some tables preferred beers and spirits.

With the final invoice about 60% of the cost was wine, 40% beers, softs and spirits.

Guesstimating based on average drink prices our guests went through about 400 non wine drinks, and about 80 bottles of wine.  So about 6 glasses of wine pp and 6 other drinks pp for a reception from 4pm till midnight.  

We do drink a lot in Scotland but also some of this was waste from placing the wine on tables instead of doing a waiters pour.

Australian_girl_in_Paris

Depends on your guests - I just went to an Irish/Sri-Lankan wedding and they ran out of Gin at 9pm!! 

So think about who's coming. Are they big drinkers? Are they wine drinkers?

Over buy is the advice here. Check with where you buy - you might be able to return what you don't use? 


If you're saving on the wine, why don't you make up a sign for the bar with the wines that are available so that people with choose those first? Just an idea

levioosa

Hey OP, stick around and change your name to something we can recognize! 

Bevmo has great wine sales where you can buy a bottle and get the next one for $0.05. The only catch is that it looks like you can only return the wine within seven days of purchase with the receipt if you have stuff left over.  Obviously double check the policy with them if you decide to shop there, but that might be something worth checking out.  I freaking love their five cent wine sales.  lol.