Wedding Wines

Five days before my wedding last September, it felt like nothing was going according to plan. Despite insisting throughout my entire 21-month engagement that I’d never be that bride making critical decisions at the last minute, that’s precisely what happened. Although my then-fiancé and I had spent nearly a year planning our dream wedding in Paris, somehow we’d made it all the way to the week of without finalizing key details. Crucially, we still hadn’t selected the wines to be served at our reception. Now, as an incredibly particular wine lover, I figured choosing the offerings for my wedding would be a task I’d take very seriously. I had lofty, grandiose visions of sampling bottles upon bottles, carefully considering reds and whites, and meticulously pairing them with our menu selections. Surely I would be deeply involved in the decision-making process and wouldn’t settle for anything less than the best for my big day. Right? But as it so often does, life got in the way. Romanticized fantasies of slowly sipping wines and diligently deliberating their robustness never materialized. Instead, I left it all up to chance. With the wedding just days away, our lovely French planner sent a kind-but-clearly-exasperated email, “Have you made your choice? Would you like me to ask the hotel what their recommendation would be based on the menu you have chosen?” Knowing how much the wine selection meant to me, my fiancé said the decision was mine to make. Overwhelmed with 11th-hour wedding stresses, I could barely muster up the energy to even think about wine, let alone make the final call. “Yes, we’ll just let them decide,” I told him as he typed up our response. It wasn’t how I imagined that scenario playing out. But I can tell you that the wine was excellent, and even without obsessing, we were able to share our passion for it with our guests. There was a red, a white, a Champagne (we were in Paris after all), and they were a delicious part of an unforgettably happy evening, all the more so because we didn’t get lost in the details.