Wedding Blog
Over the last few weeks I’ve been thinking about what beverages we will be serving and how much we’ll need. I looked over our list of guests and came up with a breakdown of who thought would drink what. Then I played with several online beverage calculators and came up with the following beverage needs:
We have a budget of about $720.
Our red wine selection is only $6 a bottle. When we had it, we were surprised it wasn’t a $8 or $9 wine. We’re buying the gin at the Coast Guard station and are hoping they carry Pimm’s too. If not, we can buy it at the state liquor store or have some of our European visitors bring it in for us.
Over the weekend, we visited a wine shop our rehearsal dinner caterer suggested. They recommended the $6 Cabernet Sauvignon we really like.
The visit was OK, but a little shocking. The person who helped us obviously knew his wine; he suggested some good wines we could try in the $8 range. The shocking part? The amount of wine he thought we needed.
I shared with him the breakdown I came up with, and he suggested a whopping 7 cases of wine. I think my jaw literally dropped. I asked him how he came up with the math, and here’s his breakdown, despite what I shared about our guests.
Of 100 people:
Um, is it me or does that add up to 162 guests?
We left the recommended wine shop scratching our heads, but 4 bottles of wine/bubbly richer.
After some conversation in the car, we decided it may be best to visit some other local wine shops.
The second place we went to confirmed that we weren’t crazy. We shared our guest breakdown and the salesperson said 1.5 – 2 cases of red and white for a total of 3-4 cases. Phew! That was much better! We also walked out of there with 3 more bottles of goodness.
On the way home, we decided to stop by one more shop. We presented our numbers and thankfully they reconfirmed what we heard at shop two, more or less. They said 1 case of red and 2 cases of white. Happy with the news, we also walked out of there with 3 more bottles.
11 bottles of wine later, we’re pretty confident that we’ll only need 3-4 cases. We may go with 4, since we were offered some amazing deals from each shop. We’ve yet to decide what to serve – that comes Friday. We’re having friends over to taste the whites and the 3 kinds of bubbly.
How did you figure out how much liquid goodness to buy? Did you rely on an online beverage calculator, a local wine shop, or did you just pull it out of thin air?
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Go with 4, if it’s between 3 and 4. Shouldn’t be a budget-buster’s worth more in cost, and if you have any leftovers, you’ll have wine to host parties with after the wedding. 
Sounds like the first wine seller was trying to pull a fast one on you and hoped you wouldn’t notice!
I think for us it’ll be a combo of evite’s online beverage calculator coupled with our own knowledge of our guest’s drinking habits. We’ve thrown enough parties where we know how much they drink. Our policy is always to have more than enough rather than not. But that’s just us. We know we can always take it home and we’ll drink it or give it to the inlaw.s =)
Haha I love crazy mathed salespeople! I usually find them at the furniture store, but maybe one of their salespeople moonlights at your wine shop!
Love Pimms! We served it at our wedding, since we live in London now. Everyone LOVED it.
Don’t know if this is an option for you, but most of the larger beverage stores in my area allow you to return unopened bottles after an event (sometimes for a 10% restocking fee, but usually for free). This worked out VERY well for the weddings of a number of friends. They bought waaaay more than they thought they needed and just returned the extra after the wedding. (alas not an option at my venue). Worked out particularly well for one friend - people drank a LOT more than she thought they would and she would have ran out if she hadn’t bought extra!
Interesting math for the first seller… I may be wrong, but he may have tried to trick you with the numbers. Oddly enough, the numbers are correct, only because in the numbers for the 1 glass of wine, he was including those who will have 2, 3 and 4 glasses. Same for the 2nd glass of wine, he was including those who will have 3 and 4 glasses. Pretty sneaky seller =)
Oh my, we’re trying to figure this out now. We’ve been dealing with two different liquor stores in this regard … the first one seemed to be estimating high IMO as far as what we’d need. Even worse, the guy has been really pushy and calling me every week to pressure me into signing a contract with them. The second one seems much more reasonable and even better, it’s run by a recently married couple, so they know what we’re going through! Plus, they have the cutest shop 
Still, not sure exactly how much we should buy. But I guess we need to figure it out soon!
We had about 150 guests and had a bottle of red and a bottle of white on each table. For the table wines, we had 2 cases of red and 2 cases of white. Every bottle got finished. For behind the bar, we had several magnums of red and white and we had leftover wine.
I’m not sure if you mentioned before that you were having a modified open bar, but my stepdad (who does catering/bartending) says vodka is always the number one drink at weddings. For our wedding, a ton of vodka was consumed, as was a ton of gin.
We didn’t really calculate per-person, we really just thought about it per-table. I’ve been to an event with enthusiastic drinkers where two bottles per table meant a lot of wandering around and trying to scam a swig off other tables, and I’ve been to an event with a crowd more like our friends and family, where two bottles per table meant two half-bottles at the end.
We bought a case of red and a case of white for 100 people, and when only 60-some people attended, we ended up with spares.
I forget how much beer we brought; there was a metric crapton left over, though.
For cocktail hour we had big ol’ jars with lemonade, iced tea, cranberry juice, and a family rum punch recipe. I figured the juice and the lemonade could function as mixers, and we’d bring hard liquor out later in the evening. Completely forgot. Our second anniversary is this month (yes, I still read weddingbee, it’s an addiction), and we still have unopened bottles of vodka we forgot to set out.
Thanks for this post Miss Joey! We started trying to figure out how much alcohol we need, but have no idea where to start. What were some of the better online drink calculators you used?
We went through much more but only serve beer and wine.. no one complained (at least not to me )
Do you guys have a Beverages and More nearby? If you hit their nickle sale, you can get $12 on the first, and the next for a nickle, ALSO you can return all unused alcohol for CASH. It was great!
If not, do you know anyone inthe military? you can buy your alcohol tax-free on the bases.
@Tallbride: No BevMos in Washington. All hard liquor must be purchased from State run liquor stores. My sister as access to the PX on base, so we’ll get the hard stuff there.
My husband & I went through our guest list and estimated how much beer and/or wine each of our friends/family would drink. Then for those we weren’t sure (parents’ friends, for example) we figured they were older and it was safe to estimate 2-3 glasses or wine or beers each. Then we added about 25% to be safe. We had a keg as well as bottled beer and wine. We had about 2 cases of beer left over which went to the hotel and was mostly consumed by friends at the impromptu after-party in the parking lot! We had 4 cases of wine (2 red/2 white) for 120 guests and returned the leftover bottles (I want to say there were about 10). Good luck!
The french bistrot where we’re having our wedding has a fine selection, so we’ve picked out the red/wine/bubbly that we’re intending to serve, and they’ll stock up sufficiently.
that way, we don’t have to worry about running out of a certain kind!
what is the name of the $6 bottle… i know NOTHING about reds
Yes, I definitely want to hear about the 6 buck bottle! We’re dying to know, Miss J!
Actually I am not surprised at all by the estimate for 7 cases…
It seems that the normal calculation used here is 1 bottle of white for 5 people and 1 bottle of red for 3. Considering that there are 6 glasses of wine per bottle that comes to 1 glass of white and 2 glasses of red per person, which is a modest estimate over the course of an entire meal.
So counting 6 bottles to a case and 100 people I calculate:
33 bottles of red and 20 of white
or 5.5 cases of red and 3 cases of white. Or 9 overall to be safe.
Unless of course we’re talking cases of 12 bottles, in which case 4 (maybe 5 to be safe) should be enough!
If you buy your wine/beer from Costco you can return any unused bottles. They don’t have a huge selection, but there are some great value wines. I know several people who have done this for weddings and said it was no problem to make the returns.
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Mrs. Joey, Seattle
Age and Occupation: 28, Project Administrator for Public Health NGO
Fiance's Age and Occupation: 30, High School History Teacher
Engagement Date: June 24, 2008
Wedding Date: August 2009
Venue: Eastside Catholic Chapel and Lake Union Cafe
About Me: I'm a Seattle girl through and through except for the fact that I don't drink coffee. I love my job most of the time because I get to travel and work with brilliant people who are trying to prevent Malaria. I love DIY projects of all sorts, cooking, and watching sports. I'd wear anything at Anthropologie and could spend all day on Etsy. I love to travel but shouldn't because I always get myself into unbelievable situations!
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