How to Choose a Great Wine for Dinner

Picking wine to go with dinner can be tricky. Do you want red or white? Something dry, sweet, or in between? How about something fruity or earthy? Or maybe you’re trying to lose weight and are looking for low-calorie wine? 

You read that right. Nowadays, you can find low sugar and low carb premium wines, and you can learn more about them at BrandRated here. We understand it’s hard to decide on wine with so many options available, so we created this article for you. This guide will teach you how to choose excellent wine for any occasion. So, whether you’re hosting a dinner party or just trying to pick something for your usual weeknight meal, read on to learn the things you need to look for when selecting a bottle of wine.

Start with Understanding the Characteristics

The first place to start when choosing great wine for dinner or any occasion is to understand the basics of wine flavors. This is very important because if you don’t understand the basic characteristics of wine and you happen to have invited someone who tells you about their preferred wine flavor, you won’t be able to get the right one.

• Body: Start by understanding what it means when someone mentions the body of the wine. Essentially, the body of the wine means how light or heavy it feels when it is in your mouth. You can describe wine as having either a full body, a light body, or something in between. As a rule of thumb, white wines generally have lighter bodies than red wines.
• Acidity: The next word that you need to know is the acidity of the wine, which equates to how taut it will feel when you taste it. Wines with little acidity will be richer or rounder, whereas wines with high acidity will taste more tart.
• Sweetness: Finally, the last word that you need to add to your wine vocabulary is the sweetness of the wine. People will often describe wines as either dry, semi-sweet, or sweet.

The next challenge is experimenting with different wines so that you can remember what they taste like. Also, keep in mind that there’s no shame in asking the attendant for assistance when purchasing wine.

Know Your Favorite Flavors

Once you’re done with the basics, you need to learn your favorite flavors, which, in terms of choosing wine, can be a little more complicated than you might think. This is because some people enjoy sweet food, others enjoy savory ones, and some enjoy both. Then again, for others, it really just depends on the actual food in question.

The same goes for wines: you might enjoy sweet food, but you might find that you actually like semi-sweet wine. To help you out, if you appreciate apple or apple juice, you’ll love sweet white wine. On the other hand, if grapefruit juice is more of your favorite, you’ll most likely want dry white wine. Again, the only way to learn which wines you enjoy is through trial and error.

Beginners Can Start with Rose or White

The next thing you’ll have to keep in mind when choosing great wine for dinner is the experience that the guests have with the wine in question. Like many things in life, your tastes will mature or evolve as you gain more experience, and with wine, this is no different. It might be similar to beer with the expression that beer is something you learn to like.

Regardless of the reasoning, research has shown that people who have little experience drinking wine or have not drunk wine very often will most likely prefer rose wine or sweet wine. According to that study, around 54% of the participants said their first wine of choice was either rose wine, semi-sweet wine, or sweet wine. 

So, if you haven’t drunk much wine yet or know that the people around your table don’t drink wine very often, it’s a good idea to serve one of those wine types. It’s better than getting something like dry red wine that you or your guests may not enjoy.