Everyone can order what they want, and you can arrive late and leave early or whatever. There’s a sense at dinner parties of being trapped if you don’t like the person you’re sitting next to.To tell the truth, my wife does most of the cooking now, and she cooks an amazing roast chicken. But we’ve only had maybe a grand total of 10 dinner parties in the past five years.The secret of having a really good dinner party, although I wouldn’t claim to be any great expert, is getting the right mix of interesting people. It’s fun to introduce people to each other, but there should be a combination of strangers and old friends.Jenny Colgan, Author and comedianI don’t believe in lavish dinner parties. I can’t stand fancy-food dinner parties where there are two people in the kitchen and you never see them. I go to dinner parties for the company.I would always take a lasagne or a fish-pie, lots of wine and interesting people over five courses of fraught social conventions. I don’t even have a big dinner table, so there are always people sitting on the floor and mishmashed knives and forks and stuff.Something like roast chicken is great, because it’s easy and everyone’s eaten it a million times, so everyone can just relax.As for wine, the older I get the less I drink and the fussier I seem to have become over it.
It’s really important to choose your wine carefully, because everyone remembers those awful student evenings where you’re drinking sherry at half past 10 in the evening.So the important thing is to buy some good stuff, and loads of not-so-good stuff in case people decide they want to stay.J G Ballard, AuthorThere are few consolations of being my age. But there are a couple: you don’t have to dance and you don’t have to go to dinner parties. Having said that, I’ve been the happy guest at a great number of very entertaining dinner parties in my life, and where I met all sorts of interesting people. But they are for people who are younger than I am now.The dinner parties of the chattering classes are huge markets for opinions, where opinions are bought and sold. They are intellectual trading centres.Now I just go and have dinner with friends at restaurants, and I’m a great wine drinker; in fact, it’s the only thing I drink.
The trouble is, if you go on about wine you sound like the leading character in Sideways. Because watching that film I cringed with embarrassment, because so many of the things that Miles said, I had said too.But I have never, never hosted dinner parties at home The place was always just too chaotic Better to host a dinner at a restaurant by far.. It’s odd how claret seems to be both so in demand and out of fashion at the same time. Why do so many of the latest restaurant wine lists contain such lengthy litanies of pricey claret?
It’s odd how claret seems to be both so in demand and out of fashion at the same time. According to G?rd Basset, England’s top sommelier, “it’s basically only expensive Bordeaux that sells”.
True, for the few dozen “celebrity” ch?aux looking forward to the annual tasting of the 2004 vintage in April, life’s a parade. For practically every other Bordeaux producer facing the prospect of trying to sell another bumper crop of who knows what quality, it’s a charade. Claret sales to the UK last year were down a third in value; exports aren’t exactly gushing from France’s biggest and most historic fine-wine region.The rumpled, bearded Christian Delpeuch is an unlikely looking saviour, but the 58-year-old head of the Bordeaux merchant firm Ginestet has just been elected president of the Bordeaux Council (CIVB) with a brief to revive Bordeaux’s flagging fortunes.