iVillage: What are some crowd-pleasing wines you should have on hand around the holidays when you're entertaining?
Ted Allen: The holidays are obviously the most important time of the year for Champagne sales, so everyone's thinking about sparklers. There's just nothing that adds more elegance and festivity to the wine service you might offer for an aperitif. If you haven't already tried some variations on sparklers, people love being served cava and prosecco, which not everybody is familiar with yet. Prosecco is a white Italian sparkling wine that is bottled much the way Champagne is. Cava is the Spanish version. These are both white, dry sparklers. The nice thing about cava in particular, and prosecco to a slightly lesser extent, is that they're generally not very expensive.
I think a fun thing to do for a holiday party would be to do a Champagne tasting. Nothing formalized; just speak with the guy in the wine shop and say, "Give me three small producers that no one's ever heard of that cost under $20 apiece"... and then serve three of them and have them be distinctly different styles. And let your guests just experience a range of Champagnes. Nobody ever does that.
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