Hosting Tips For Backyard Summer Gatherings

(StatePoint) It’s the time of year for backyard bashes with friends and family. The best part about being the host? Creating relaxing summer vibes with great food and wine.

Joe Welch and Zach Feinberg, good friends and co-founders of In Good Taste, a new kind of winery on a mission to make wine more accessible and less intimidating for the everyday drinker, offer these backyard party tips for warm weather fun:

Summer Sips

The best wines for summer are refreshing and feature high acidity, a light-to-medium body, and a dry flavor leading to a crisp finish. Think whites, rosés and light-bodied reds. To invigorate your guests and enhance the subtle tasting notes of these wines, serve them at a slight chill. Be sure to consider your glassware, too. “Stemmed glassware keeps warm hands off cold wines and helps maintain the right temperature for longer,” says Welch.

Pairing Tricks

When pairing wine and cheese, an easy place to start is by looking for cheese from the same region where the grape first originated. While this works in most cases, these quick, additional rules that look at age, depth and complexity can help you take pairing a step further:

• Young and soft cheeses with silky textures and creamy body pair especially well with young and lively wines full of fruit, good acidity and spirited aromas.

• To stand up to the richness and in many cases, sharpness of aged cheeses full of rich, fatty and savory flavor, choose old, bold and rich wines with good tannins that leave a tacky feeling on your tongue.

• Salty cheeses pair especially well with sweet wines, as the saltiness brings out the sweetness even more.

Take a Flight

Anyone who has enjoyed a thoughtful wine flight knows that variety is the spice of life. Whether you’re throwing the party yourself or need the perfect hostess gift, consider In Good Taste’s flights, which are offered at every price point in the brand’s patented 187 milliliter mini bottles, giving hosts the ability to put eight different wines on ice. Really delivering on those light, summery vibes is their California Wine Mixer tasting flight, which includes all the greats, including Rosé, Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay, along with some surprises. The brand makes snacks easy for hosts too, offering a premium selection of meat and cheese with Antonelli’s Cheese Shop’s carefully curated Cheese Meats Treats tray. To shop flights and gifts, book a virtual or in-person wine tasting with an expert, or for additional wine 101, visit ingooodtaste.com.

“You don’t need to be a sommelier to get wine right at your backyard gatherings and other events,” says Feinberg. “Wine is for anybody who enjoys it, and with a little bit of know-how, this aspect of summer hosting can be fun, not stressful.”