A wine dinner, or any dinner party, is like a staging a play. When you plan your food-wine matches, you can start either with the food or with the wine. If you're a particularly good cook — or if you have a special recipe that you want to showcase — choose the wine based on how it will complement the food. If the food is to be the star, you'll want a wine in the “best supporting” role. If you have some exceptional bottles of wine that you've acquired and want to serve to an appreciative audience, choose foods with some subtlety.

Before You Enter the Dining Room

A dinner party should begin with a proper cocktail hour. A great way to welcome your guests and whet their appetites is to have crisp, refreshing wines available with light hors d'oeuvres. Many wines make great aperitifs, especially those with good acidity, as they get the salivary glands working.

• Dry Champagnes or sparkling wines are the best.

• A good still white wine is Sauvignon Blanc. If guests have a low tolerance for acidity, have smoother, creamier Chardonnay available.

• The best red aperitifs are Beaujolais wines, Côtes du Rhone, and the occasional Pinot Noir. Save your bigger reds for the dinner table.

Gathering at the Table

If you're serving more than one kind of wine with the meal, there's a general progression that works best for enjoyment. Serve white wines before reds, light wines before heavy ones, and dry wines before sweet ones. Yes, there are always circumstances that defy the rules. Perhaps you only served white wines as guests arrived and mingled. There is nothing wrong with serving only red wines with dinner, assuming they complement your dishes, of course.

How Much Wine to Buy

How many bottles of each should you buy for your dinner party? With so many variables — your friends' passion for wine, the number of courses you plan to serve, if you plan to have a different wine with each course, the pace of the evening — there's no definitive answer. Here's a chart to help you decide how long various wine bottle sizes will last, assuming your servings per person per course are four or five ounces.

CONTENTS OF TYPICAL WINE BOTTLES AND CONTAINERS

Dessert wines are a separate consideration altogether. You can serve them as an accompaniment to a dessert, or as the dessert itself. The serving size is much smaller, and the bottle size is half that of a table wine.