How many bottles?

We had ~100 guests. Approximately 15% did not drink. We went thru 27 bottles of red (2 1/2 cases) and 23 bottles (2 cases) of white.

We used an un-oaked chardonnay for the white (Four Vines Naked Chard) and Brazin' Old Vine Zin for the red. I was surprised that the consumption of red outpaced the white... but the guests really enjoyed the red.

We have a lot of big drinkers in our family which is the problem, so we are buying one white and one red for each table and we are having tables of between 6 and 8 (total of 65 people)

Our guests were not "heavy" drinkers and nobody was falling-down drunk. A few were VERY happy but not sloppily so. We had coctail hour and plated dinner followed by ~4 hrs of dancing.

Other bar numbers you might find helpful:

- 13 bottles of champagne 3 bottles of nonalc cider (mainly for toasting)

- 69 bottles of beer

- 81 drinks w/ spirits. (33 of these were generous pour of bourbon. it's a family thing)

- 48 sodas (coke, diet coke, etc)

Jenna - I just noticed you were in California. You might find that your best pricing for the quality is to order directly from the winery. I suggest asking the venue if you can have wine shipped directly to them from the winery. Both the options we used for our wedding are CA wines.

If you can also order champagne by the case, I would suggest Korbel Sec (also in CA). It has a more universal appeal (is not too sweet or not too dry.)

We used this calculator to try to figure out how much alcohol we needed. It has three different calculators for beer, wine, alcohol.

http://www.thealcoholcalculator.com/

Thank you guys so much!! I don't really drink, so was not sure how much to buy...our venue allows outside wines, but they do have a corkage fee, which I would rather avoid.

Is providing two drink tokens acceptable? After reading, I'm thinking I'll need at least 2 bottles per table...that calculator thing is amazing

The venue markup on wines is usually atrocious. You could probably get a better deal by bringing in your wine and paying a (reasonable) corkage fee... or, at least, end up with better wine for the same price.

You might also be able to negotiate the corkage fee. At the last event we held in CA, we were able to get the corkage fee down to ~$1 per bottle.