The 36 Wine Wedding

Weddings are great. Everyone's in a good mood (generally), there's celebration in the air, and, best of all, the couple is surrounded by the people who make them happy. These are the reasons I love working weddings. I've been very fortunate to work several awesome weddings so far, but my favorite yet has been what I call "The 36 Wine Wedding."

Madeleine and Matt reached out to me through my website and told me all about how much they love wines from New York — my home state. We quickly connected over our mutual love of New York and Long Island wines. They told me that, for their wedding, The Lost Fox Inn in Connecticut (the venue they chose), had a number of New York wines for them to choose from for their dinner service. They loved those wines, but they wanted something a little different as well. In fact, they wanted something VERY different — they wanted 36 bottles of wine from around the world (with a focus on New York) of all sorts. They requested dessert wines, and red wines, and whites, rosés, and orange wines. They gave me a budget of $1,000 to find these 36 bottles and told me to see what I could find.

Over the next 2 months, I went to wine stores all over New York, wrote to wineries around the country requesting individual bottles, and found rare and interesting wines through my industry connections. Some standout wines that I found were:

• A 1943 Pedro Ximénez Sherry from Jerez, Spain (it was beautiful and very very sweet!);
• A bottle of Zinfandel from a now-defunct winery in Napa called Silenus;
• A few bottles of older vintages from Long Island (including Lieb, Roanoke, and Martha Clara);
• A 2007 Sauternes from France;
• and a sparkling wine which was my gift to the couple — aged under the Mediterranean Sea and with barnacles growing on the bottle, it was odd and interesting — exactly the kind of thing I knew they would love.

Pouring wines at weddings is my calling. It's the kind of thing that just makes me proud to do what I do. Keeping the couple's glasses filled all evening; knowing what each of their guests wanted to try for a second, third, and fourth glass; chatting with anyone who wanted to know more about each of the wines and the producers; and making recommendations about the wineries to anyone keen on visiting them in the future.

The 36 Wine Wedding was my favorite so far and I can't wait to do another wedding that gives me this kind of freedom choosing the bottles again.