You should at least provide three white varietals and three red varietals for any party that you are hosting. This way, you can please the palates of those guests whose tastes range from sweet white wines to dry whites and the palates of those guests whose tastes range from light reds to full bodied reds.

When you are choosing wine for your party, you will have to take into consideration, your guests? tastes, your budget and the number of guests that will attend your party. You want to provide the best possible wine that your guests will appreciate that you can obtain for the number of people that you are inviting.

You should not invite so many people to your party that you cannot afford to purchase enough appropriate wine for all of your guests to enjoy. If you are hosting a party for neophyte wine drinkers, you can probably spend less on your wine selections and still please the palates of each of your guests. For such a party, you will probably need to purchase more bottles of sweet white wine and light bodied red wine than dry whites and heavy reds because the latter tastes are tastes that people typically develop after tasting wine for a longer time-period than has the neophyte.

For a party of neophyte wine drinkers who wish to become connoisseurs, you want to be sure to select only wines that are rated well even if they wines are sweeter and lighter in body. You would not want to put off anyone from learning more about wine by making his or her first wine experience distasteful.

On the other hand, you would not want to invest hundreds of dollars in a few bottles of wine if your guests have not yet developed a taste for fine wines. The subtleties and the complexities of such fine wine would probably be lost on neophyte palates. Expensive wines with heavy or dry flavors that are bursting with subtleties and complexities should be reserved for the wine tasters who have developed a palate that appreciates nuances such as a fine bouquet or a velvety texture.

When you select wines for a party that wine connoisseurs will attend, you should select fine wines and you should weight your selections with dry whites and heavy reds. This is not to say that you should completely neglect lighter and sweeter wines, but such selections should be well considered and less in attendance than the heavier wines for which connoisseurs tend to have a sensitive palate. In order to make available the types of wine that you would wish to serve experienced connoisseurs, you might wish to invite fewer guests so that you can offer nothing but the best of wines to them.