The Importance of Rosé

Rose’ is a wine I drink as much for pure pleasure as for intellectual stimulation. In the warmer months there is something sacred about a late afternoon meal of cold chicken, fresh garden tomatoes, and rose’. It is one body in the sacred trilogy of rustic simplicity.

Proper rose’ is refreshing, life-nourishing stuff that revives the soul, much the same way that dark, smoky, red wines replete with rich fruits replenish and warm in the depleting months of winter.

However, anything equivalent to the delicately colored roses I adore from Bandol and Provence are hard to come by from the New World. Too often, the economic-ease of bleeding off some juice from grapes picked for red wine, is used as the guiding philosophy for making pink wine. The results are often times horrendous. The juice, picked at high potential alcohols, lacks the vivaciousness of fruit and brightness of good rose’. Frequently, high levels of residual sugar are left in to cover-up a lack of character.

Rose’, in my opinion, should bear a closer resemblance to white wine than to red.

It is for this reason that I pick at potential alcohols lower on the scale where brightness and lift still exist. This is not to say that fruit does not matter—I use Mourvedre from a block planted over 120 years ago for requisite concentration of complexity of flavor—but like fine champagne, the wonders of rose’ lie in its unbearable lightness of being.