DIY Wedding Revisited: Wedding Wine

With weddings, there usually comes wine! Well…for me anyways.  I thought it would be a special touch to make and bottle my own wine for the wedding.  We set off to Wine Creations in Hermantown, Minnesota to make Traminer Riesling

and Wine Zinfandel for the occasion.  Then, three days before the wedding we realized that we had labeled the wine wrong.  Say whhhaat?  When you make wine you mix the ingredients, wait several months and come back and bottle it.  When you are bottling they print customized labels for you as part of the package price, which was wayyy cheaper per bottle than buying it from the venue.  Our labels had our names, wedding date, thank you message, and the wine type.  When you are bottling this delicious wine you get to sample it.  I am thinking we had too many samples because some Riesling labels were on the Zinfandale and vice versa.  This resulted in a panicked call and trip to Wine Creations to print labels….after we had peeled all the labels off!  Of course their printer was broken.  Why wouldn’t it be?  They were amazing enough to let me take blank labels home and print them on the computer.  Some come the wedding day all the wines were thankfully correctly labeled. 

Then came the next hurdle.  Before we made the wine we checked it out with our venue if it was okay if we brought in home made wine.  They said sure and that it was no problem.  Then when a version of the bill came it stated they were charging a $12.00 uncorking fee…per bottle….even if they didn’t have to uncork it.  Ouch… but after bartering with our contact he agreed to waive the fee with the condition that we only had two bottles per table and opened the wine ourselves.  I purchased a ton of small bark un-corkers and hung them from the neck of the bottles with blue ribbon. Problem solved! Now, let's drink wine!

*Pictures of the wedding day were taken exclusively by Amber Asman of asmanphotography.  In short, she rocks.