Wedding Photos
August 21, 2008
No, no, not from MY wedding, from the wedding we attended this past weekend. It was absolutely gorgeous. The winery was way up at the top of a mountainside, and overlooked the vineyard. It was really cold and breezy at first, but warmed up to the perfect temperature within minutes of the ceremony.
We had at least a dozen wine servers during dinner. It seemed like they had an army: three drink servers would descend upon each table every drink rotation. I suppose that’s the most important thing to the winery, their other servers were a little off their beat because they tried to serve half a table’s dinners before bringing out salads. Oops!
It was a short and sweet ceremony, which I always appreciate because my attention tends to wander, and there were hors d’oerves galore: a spring roll station, a sushi station, a wine tasting station, an open bar (open the ENTIRE TIME), an assorted candies station with little Chinese takeout boxes designed for the guests to fill up on their own favors, and servers walking around with rectangular serving plates with six little servings of each food. I can’t imagine how many times those poor folks had to go back to refill on the banana topped, brie-filled brioches, the cheese stuffed figs, or several other items that I can’t even remember. Oh, and we can’t forget the coffee and tea station because BF promptly spilled coffee on his shoes. Honestly, I’m just glad I didn’t pratfall on my way out to bring him napkins, we’d be the klutziest pair there.
There was a string quartet playing before the ceremony and a DJ for the rest of the evening, and the older folks had an absolute blast because they played mostly oldies.
The pf blogger in me was quietly more than a little amazed at how people could afford the kind of money this wedding cost. I’m just now toting up the prices in my head, thinking, the amount of effort that went into this is far more than I’d be willing to commit to a wedding for myself, much less the resources. The venue alone must have been $8000 because it’s still summer and wedding season, it was on a Saturday and lasted the entire day. As early as everything started, complete with several limo buses to ferry people up the mountain, they had to have booked the winery for the entire day. Oh yes! They had luxury limos to bring their guests to and from the wedding site to the selected hotel. Amazing. I’m pretty sure the limos were reserved for the full day as well because the invitation stated that the limos would be available to return people to the hotel for a four hour block before the festivities ended for those who wanted to leave early. We already know the flowers were $6000, from the groom’s mother, and that’s a cool $15,000 just for a place, before all the catering, drinks and service, music, or any other wedding party accoutrements.
As lovely as it was, as gorgeous as the entire ceremony and all the trappings were, I felt absolutely certain that the older I get, the less I want this kind of wedding. I’m not sure what I’d want, I can’t quite picture it other than not to be the center of attention, but the fuzzy edges of the image of what I’d enjoy certainly looks much less grandiose.
so many words, so little insight
Definitely a beautiful wedding! I agree that I wouldn’t want to throw myself such a fancy party – there are so many other things I could spend the money on – but I still love attending them.
My brain just started screaming “WTF???” at $6K for flowers.
Also, LOL at the Anon who had to type in letter verification to make their stupid comment. š
$6k for flowers is insane, but they’re gorgeous!!!!!!!!!!
anon: Since you went to all that trouble to comment …
susanna: Even though I have different priorities, it’s nice to enjoy a really fancy party.
paranoidasteroid: š yeah, I know. I think my smile was a bit frozen as I realized they really meant six thousand dollars. Just for the flowers.
savingdiva: And they were really creatively done, too. They looked smashing!