Superficially Rose
Why do pink wines get a free pass?
Summer’s here so it's time for me to let a little air out of the rosé bubble. In the last few weeks, I've read posts on this platform and elsewhere gushing about the rosé lifestyle and blah blah blah.
As a rosé cynic this irks me. Not because I don't know how to simply drink and enjoy, but because modern rosé is generally a calculated product of enological prowess and marketing.
And I’ve go some personal history here.
The world capital of rosé is of course Provence in its various appellations. I moved to the region with my Nice-born wife and French speaking Texas-born son (then 7) in the summer of 2001, where we lived full time for 15 years.
Sure, cheap rosé was dominant, drunk by expats like water at the beach, or at lunch or even on the tennis court. But most wineries then produced three colors of wine. In France in general, a decentralization of wine quality was moving attention away from only Bordeaux and Burgundy and toward the provinces, and most of the wines I explored, drank, loved and rooted for were spicy reds from the south of France and Provence.
At the time the safe winery money was in rosé, but the experimentation and action was in reds from southern varieties like Grenache, Mourvèdre, Carignan and others found in limestone terrors across the region from Bandol to Mont Sainte-Victoire to Villars-sur-Var to Nice’s Bellet (dominated by native Folle Noire).
Sure, I get the temptation to produce more and more rosé. But giving in rarely leads to greatness. Provence’s wine establishment did a fantastic job market-testing shades of pink to steer consumers away from the old quality standard of dark, complex Tavel and towards to pink the palest of salmon or onion skin pinks.
“The first association of pink is with something outside the normal, different. And the second association is with affection. L’amour” Gilles Masson, the director of Provence’s Center for Research and Experimentation on Rosé Wine, explained me to me a dozen years ago. The lightest of pales pinks performed best with consumer groups.
It’s hard to compete with love, I know, but that doesn’t mean that wine writers have to fall for it.
For the record, I was a big fan of the Sumeire family’s Chateau Barbeyrolles near Saint Tropez which produced the first “Petal de Rose” cuvée in 1985 by pressing whole berry Grenache in a Champagne press. Imitators copied the color, but couldn't copy the intricacies of flavor.
Now, dear readers, I am going to tell you the reason why the trendy style of pale pink rosé produces mediocre wines. It’s simple: to extract some flavors and aromas from red grapes without extracting color, you have to make compromises. The other option is you can strip out color (with other components) after-the-fact with strong fining and filtering. Either way you generally end up with wine that’s a shadow of what it wants to be. Darker rosés like the Tavel style on the other hand, allow the wine’s character to express itself.
I'm somewhat resentful of the thing that killed off a lot of Provence innovation and its once burgeoning red wine scene. That thing was the bankster-produced 2008 financial crisis. The Great Recession that followed squeezed everyone. Provence producers needed quick cash flow— not to be burdened with cellaring reds. And consumers wanted something cheap and cheerful. Voilà! Rosé became that perfect new global derivative.
Today Provence wines (depending how you group the appellations) are more than 90% rosé. Summer means more hype in wine media, on Instagram and nowadays evermore Insta-like Substack. Even worse is that producers in Italy and across southern Europe have been making Provence-style rosé.
So does oohing and ahhing online about pink wine in general make you a superficial person? Probably, but so what? There are worse fates. The point I'm getting to is that we all need to broaden our horizons on this category. To that end I reproduce here a 2024 article I wrote about a fascinating maybe even lost-cause international project founded in Tavel in 2020 called Rosés de Terroirs that aims to “tell stories of places and of winemakers that are often unique.”
It may not change your mind about rosé, but it may open it.
Battle of the Roses
When it comes to styles of pink wines beyond Provence, vive la difference!
Why do I generally avoid rosé? Because I love wine.
That statement may ring true for many of you, but is blasphemy to others.
I don’t dislike an entire category of wine. I just don’t like what it’s become in the 21st century. Some years ago, when I was living in Southern France, I got bored with the sameness of rosé made in the light, breezy, Provençal style that boomed in popularity, attracting drinkers with its beautiful, ultra-pale pink color.
So, before we start talking again this spring about the thirst-slaking rosés of summer and the latest celebrity pink wines, let me say that I think wine should be more than refreshment.
I want wine of any color to hold up to a meal with some mouth-filling savoriness, no matter what season it is. To bite back a bit. And ideally, I want wine to express some local character. I want some there there.
So I was cheered earlier this year when I received an invitation with the cheeky title “Rosé Rebellion on the French Riviera?” It was for a tasting and lunch organized by the three-year-old Rosés de Terroirs association.
“My view is that terroir rosés are real wines first and foremost,” wrote association president Philippe Guigal in the event program. “Through their tastes and colors, they tell stories of places and of winemakers that are often unique.”
If you seek out gastronomic rosés, you can find fine examples from Provence’s standout wineries, in the Mourvèdre-based wines of the Bandol appellation and in the Southern Rhône’s now-out-of-style deeply colored Tavel bottlings. Beyond France, other examples include oft-overlooked Italian Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo and Spanish rosados made from Tempranillo.
Guigal has a stake in darker, fleshier rosé. He runs his family’s famous Northern Rhône domaine, E. Guigal, which bought Tavel’s historic Château d’Aqueria in 2022. And Tavel, France’s oldest rosé appellation, has been nearly forgotten.
Rosés de Terroirs was launched in Tavel as a way to get back to competing with the Provence style. The association now counts about 50 wine producers across Europe, and Guigal has become an eager and vocal leader.
“This is a new step for the rosé market,” Jeremy Arnaud, development manager of the association, told me. Arnaud knows some things about rosé. From about 2000 to 2006, he worked for the regional wine council, Vins de Provence, to promote its style of light, clean and dry rosé.
“My job was to show the potential of these trendy rosés,” he said. “Now my challenge is to diversify the offering with wines that have more character, more intensity and are richer in color and taste.”
Rose styles are all about extraction and technique. In the modern Provence style, red grapes are harvested early and typically pressed quickly to minimize contact between the juice and the skins, which contribute color. Tavel can blend from among nine grape varieties; many are the same as those in Provence rosé, including Grenache, Syrah, Mourvedre, Cinsault and Carignan. But Tavel requires that the grapes undergo a cold soak of at least 12 hours—bringing more complexity and structure to the resulting wine.
To raise rosé consciousness, Rosés de Terroirs organizes monthly tastings that bring together chefs, wine industry professionals and writers. So far, they have only been held in Europe, though Arnaud is hoping to bring them to the U.S. this fall. The format goes like this: dozens of association wines are poured at a pre-lunch open tasting. Then for lunch, the hosting chef and sommelier choose wines to go with a tasting menu.
A tasting at Les Agitateurs restaurant in Nice brought together 26 wines to sample, mostly small-production bottlings from Tavel, Bandol, Provence and some lesser-known appellations in Southern France, along with rosés from Bordeaux, the Loire Valley, Italy’s Bardolino and the Greek island Syros.
One of the more interesting surprises of the day was suggested by the burly, bearded, acclaimed chef Nicolas Durif of L’Hysope in western France, near La Rochelle.
It was the 2015 vintage of Champagne producer Jacques Defrance’s still Rosé des Riceys, a tiny-production, brick-colored wine made from Pinot Noir that offered dark fruit, apricot and spice flavors.
“I am a fan of red rosé—not white rosé,” quipped Durif, who likes to age rose at least five years for the vermouth-like spicy notes that emerge with time. “We serve the light rosés to the clients who like water.”
Rosés de Terroirs has begun collecting members’ rosés to create a common aging cellar in Tavel, said Arnaud. Interest in such bottles, he conceded, “is a niche.”
For lunch, Les Agitateurs sommelier Marc Klein and rising star chef Samuel Victori put together some delicious pairings that demonstrated the diversity and versatility of rosé. From northern Italy’s Veneto region, the delicate, saline 2021 Le Fraghe Chiaretto di Bardolino Traccia di Rosa, made from Corvina and Rondinella grapes, was paired with a starter of raw scallops wrapped in nasturtium leaves. An earthy 2022 rosé from Domaine Labastidum in Southwest France’s Fronton appellation, where the blends must include the local variety Negrette, accompanied a dish of langoustines served in Earl Gray consommé.
The rich, slightly bitter Château de la Selve L’Audacieuse 2021—a biodynamic blend of Syrah, Grenache and Viognier from France’s obscure Coteaux de l’Ardèche, west of the Rhône—was served with hare ravioli in a dense quince and rose petal sauce. And a juicy Malbec from the Loire, Xavier Frissant Touraine Côt des Pierres Rosé 2022, came with dessert.
“I used to think of rose as something you drank easy on the terrace,” said Klein. “Now I look for rosés that have the acidity of a white with some of the flavors, tannins and feel you look for in a red.”
The event’s wide, wild range of wines, paired with some daringly innovative dishes, got me excited about rosé for the first time in a long while. This “movement” may not turn around the mainstream pink tide but, by showing off differences among the wines, it can help keep rose interesting for the rest of us.
As Arnaud put it, “Now we don’t talk about le rosé but les rosés.”
Hear hear. Completely superficial, as you correctly say...
Gosh I would have looooved to taste that Jacques Defrance Rosé des Riceys