How Much Food and Drink for a Wedding

The pour size decides the bottle count

People buy drinks by the bottle and think about them by the glass, and the conversion between the two is where the bar runs dry.

A 750 ml bottle gives you:

Pour	Glasses per bottle	Bottles for 900 drinks
125 ml	6	150
150 ml	5	180
175 ml	4.29	210

Same event, same guests, same number of drinks. Sixty bottles between the top and bottom row — decided by a detail nobody consciously chose.

Worth knowing: free-pouring runs generous almost everywhere. If the pour size matters to your budget, agree it with whoever is serving rather than letting it emerge.

Counts, not grams

How many grams make a portion is your caterer's question. They know their menu, their plating and their kitchen, and the answer is completely different for a plated dinner, a buffet and a canapé reception.

What people get wrong is the arithmetic in front of that:

• Portions to order — guests plus a spare allowance, rounded up
• Of those, separate-menu portions and Of those, standard portions — the dietary split
• Drinks to allow for and Bottles to buy — the part above

Those are the numbers to take into a conversation with a caterer. Having them in advance also makes an unusual assumption on a quote much easier to spot and ask about.

The per-guest rates are yours, not the tool's

Drinks per guest, first hour and Drinks per guest, each hour after default to a common planning pattern — more while people arrive and settle, fewer per hour afterwards.

That's a starting point, not a finding. Real drinking rates vary enormously with the crowd, the time of day, the weather, how many people are driving, whether there's a meal in the middle, and what's being served. A lunchtime wedding with a lot of drivers looks nothing like an evening reception.

If you've catered for this group before, your numbers beat any convention. If you're working with a venue, use theirs — they've seen that room full and you haven't.

Drinks per guest across the event is there as a sanity check. Look at it and ask whether it sounds like the people you actually invited.

Food spares and drink spares behave differently

This is why the spare allowance applies to portions only.

Catered portions are made and paid for whatever happens. If forty people don't show, you've still bought their dinner. Unopened bottles can usually be returned or kept.

So the asymmetry runs one way: be more generous with food spares than feels comfortable, and buy drinks by the case with a return arrangement. Running out of food is a much worse outcome than a slightly larger bill, and it's the one guests remember.

Ask about dietary requirements on the invitation

The percentage field is for planning before the replies are in. Once you have real RSVPs, use the real count.

Guessing is expensive in both directions — cater short and some guests get an improvised plate, cater long and you've paid for meals nobody ate.

Ask about allergies separately from preferences. They're a different kind of requirement with different consequences, and a caterer needs to know about them specifically rather than folded into a headline number.

Check the venue before you buy anything

Three things that change the arithmetic and are all easier to discover now than when a delivery arrives:

• Corkage — and whether you may supply your own alcohol at all
• Licensing hours — check them against your bar hours
• Fridge and glassware capacity — 180 bottles has to go somewhere, chilled

And count non-alcoholic options inside the drinks total rather than as an afterthought. Drivers, non-drinkers and anyone pacing themselves are still drinking something, and it still has to be bought.

It works for any event

Nothing here is wedding-specific. Guests, hours, a rate per guest and a pour size applies just as well to a birthday, a work party or a large dinner.

Weddings are just where the numbers get big enough that the bottle mistake becomes expensive and obvious. At a smaller scale the same calculation still saves you from buying drinks by the bottle while thinking in glasses.