Wedding wine

Last night we had our wine tasting evening. Two of our friends came round, and we managed to drink the three bottles that were possible wedding wines - plus two more bottles as well! It was a great night, although everyone except Gadget got a shock when we realised it was 2am!

To help with the decision making I made canapés to resemble our wedding menu. Smoked salmon blinis, tomato bruschettas and mini lamb burgers (with eggplant for the veggies). It worked really well, as the Riesling tasted better on its own, but the Pinot Gris was better with the salmon. The Syrah was good on its own and also good with the burgers.

Our 'tasting' wines

So our wedding wines will be Lindauer Sparkling (probably Special Reserve Blanc de blancs), Mud House Pinot Gris and Babich Gimlett Gravels Syrah. Two are from the east coast of the North Island, where we spent Easter (Gisborne for the fizz and Hawke's Bay for the red), with the other coming from  NZ's renowned Marlborough region where we'll be spending Christmas. My plan is to put this information onto luggage labels and attach them to the bottles, so everyone can appreciate our careful wine selection.

Now I just have to work out how many bottles we need. I think 12 red and 12 white should be fine - our guest list is currently 54 adults, but two don't drink wine and a few may be driving, so we should have around half a bottle per person. Then if we add the same amount of sparkling wine for arrival drinks and toasts, everyone should have a good time!

How to make wedding planning fun

Today we've done two things on the wedding to-do list - and we enjoyed doing both of them. Whoever said wedding planning was stressful clearly isn't doing it our way!

This morning we drove out to Kumeu in West Auckland to go wine tasting. The wine merchant our venue works with has suggested three wines from Babich - and as their office is only 20 minutes from our apartment, it would be rude not to give them a go! We tried two of the suggested wines (the merlot cabernet was ok, and the chardonnay we're not sure about) and bought a bottle of the Gimlett Gravels syrah for $10. They didn't have any open to try, but we tried their other syrah and really liked it. The plan is to try the Gimlett Gravels with dinner one night this week, and we think that might be the red wine we choose for the wedding.

Us with what is hopefully our wedding Syrah at Babich Winery

Whilst we were in Kumeu we stopped in at Soljan's vineyard for wine tasting and lunch - they had a really interesting sparkling muscat (no, mum, we can't bring you a bottle back!) - and then went to Cooper's Creek for more tastings. All in all it was a good day, despite the heavy rain that stopped us carrying on to the hot springs as we'd planned.

This evening we've been narrowing down the choices for our first dance song. After extensive research we had a long list of 19, and reading the lyrics carefully ruled three of those out. I recommend reading lyrics - one of the songs I quite liked sounded like it was about self harm, and many well-used first dance songs are actually about breaking up.

Then I got technical (it's the only way to go with Gadget around). We didn't have all the songs on the list, so I went onto Spotify and created a playlist with them all in. After dinner we listened to each song briefly, and ruled a couple out for being too soppy. The last few songs on the list were clearly not as good as the early songs, so they went as well.

This left us with nine songs, five of which we had in iTunes. We bought the other four, as we figured we must like them a lot for them to make it into the top 10! Then came the fun part - we tried dancing round the living room to all nine songs. Unfortunately The Wannadies "you and me song" is very hard to dance too, so that was off the list along with four others.

So we have a short list of four songs, which are now in an iTunes playlist for us to listen to on the way to work and attempt to make a decision. They're fairly diverse - there's one from 2006 and one from 2007, with the other two being from 1959 and 1977! They range from big band to ballad, and from soft rock to mainstream pop. It could be a tricky choice, but I'll happily dance to any of them. And no, I'm not saying what they are - not yet at least!

A way to avoid corkage charges?

Today's wedding task was to email the venue with our wine requests. Having drunk tasted our way round New Zealand, we would love to have NZ wine at the wedding. Our venue does not stock any NZ wine.

I should say at this point that Kiwis are pretty serious about their wine (in as much as they are serious about anything other than rugby). You can't go into a bar and order a 'glass of house red,' you have to at least specify the grape variety (Pinot Noir yummmmmm). They usually have at least a dozen wines served by the glass, and all of them will be better than the standard UK options. For the same price. I love going out for drinks here!

When my parents went to view the Lodge, they spoke to the coordinator Tracey about supplying our own drinks. Obviously there is a corkage charge, which we understand. Tracey said that was fine, but suggested an alternative option which would be cheaper. They would source NZ wine for us through their wine merchant, and then we would buy it from them and just pay a single standard mark up rather than corkage.

As I've only just sent the email, I don't know exactly how much this is going to cost, but Tracey thinks it will be about £20 per person for all the drinks. (Their cheapest drink package is £16 pp, the next is £21.) I'm pretty hopeful that we'll get to have some really good wine for a reasonable price.

We've sent a list of everything we like, and are waiting to see what the merchant can suggest/source. I can recommend Lindauer sparkling wine (available at Majestic currently £8.99) - we drink that a surprising amount here! It may all go horribly wrong and we'll end up with Spanish Cava and Australian Merlot, but there are worse things that could happen!

This Pinterest lark - and cake!

So I have finally got myself on Pinterest, and hopefully there is a nice little follow button now on the blog. Problem is I have no idea how to share my boards with anyone, either on here or via email to my mum. I've invited my mum to join Pinterest, but as she doesn't have Facebook or twitter that might not happen.

So if you want to see my cake ideas, look at my Pinterest board. Cake is a fairly easy decision for me - my mum makes wedding cakes (as well as seriously awesome birthday cakes, we were spoilt as kids!) and so not only do I get a (pretty much) free cake, I can have whatever I want. Within reason, mum, I know!

Gadget has been winding her up about having a 38 layer cake with pavlova as the bottom layer. Mum has actually been in tears several times laughing at him. When I managed to find a moment of seriousness in the midst of the ridicule, we have decided on a four tier cake (three for us and one for my dad who is gluten free). Fruit cake base (WARNING: do not drive after eating my mum's fruit cake), then GF fruit cake (dad's choice) then chocolate then lemon. Something for everyone there I hope.

Decoration was a harder decision, although we've finally got there. I want the tiers stacked directly (no pillars or stands), and have an idea about blue ribbon and purple flowers. It's traditional/common in the UK for the cake flowers to match the bride's bouquet, but that's not going to work for us (see flower post). So we have free reign to create a thing of colour and beauty...

When I showed gadget the original pins, he was definitely underwhelmed. As I've mentioned, we're not big on flowers. So we set about finding an alternative, and have decided on a compromise. I'm not revealing all the details until the big day, but we are going to have a lego cake topper!