Make It Pink! A Wine for All Seasons
Provisioning for class is blessedly easy this week. Find two different styles of rosé, ideally something lighter more akin to the classic pale pink wines of Provence, and something darker in color with fuller fruit and more structure. Failing that, two wines derived from different grapes or with varying levels of sweetness would suffice. There are no wrong answers. Just don’t make the mistake of casting pink wine as a one trick pony. It is just as versatile and profound as any other genre.
Bill Jensen, sommelier for Michelin-starred Washington DC restaurant Tail Up Goat, and her sister Reveler’s Hour, is a breakout star of the Covid-19 Pandemic with his virtual wine school. In an effort to stay in touch with his regulars and soon-to-be regulars, he launched #StayHome Wine School on March 29th, and continued every Sunday at 4 pm EST for 40 straight weeks. In the very beginning, it was BYOB. Later, Bill would recommend bottles to be purchased at various wine shops. Eventually, TUG and RH reopened and local wine school students could shop there, first for bottles and later also for flights.
To be added to the newsletter and gain access to the class each week, email your request to: wineschool@tailupgoat.com
Great quotes from this lesson:
There is no wrong way to drink rose, Bon Jovi will tell you as much, he makes his own rose, and he drinks it over ice.
One city state in Messalia produced a famous pink wine that the Romans developed a taste for, and spread it throughout the Mediteranean in antiquity, it was the Whispering Angel of its time.
At what point does white wine become orange; does orange become red? Quit trying to put all this shit in a box. Let it be whatever it wants to be. Let’s live in the mystery and not prescribe some little category for everything that goes into a bottle.
The K-Pop band of the rhone varietal world, the GSM triplets: Grenache, Syrah and Mourvedre
Sutter Home: It tastes like raisins. It is Adult Sprite. It is sweet but it should be said not unrefreshing.
Given the global surge in rose popularity, you still have a lot of people throwing unremarkable fruit into unremarkable wines, under the rose banner, and yeah sure, it’s great, it works well as an alcoholic soft drink. it’s not wine in the sense of having a sense of place and speaking to somewhere.
The gap between mediocre and good is relatively slim. but the gap between good and truly special is way bigger. That’s a bigger hurdle – in wine as in life.
This week’s poem was A Cradle Song by W.B. Yeats
In Bill’s weekly recap email, he said this:
– Learn more about the accidental origins and proud sales history of White Zinfandel:
– Vanity Fair considers: “When did rosé, like, become a thing?” and identifies several culprits responsible for the current boom:
– A brief history of the entire genre from a talented young somm who literally wrote the book on pink wine:
If you like the article, check out this podcast:
– “Remembering a Forgotten Rosé” from Wine Spectator with further information about the Tavel I was drinking Sunday:
– Tavel is one of the most famous but certainly not the only prestige rosé. Learn more about the category. It should be mentioned that the bottles showcased are some of my favorite wines in the world of any genre:
– A consideration of Italian pink wine touching on every region from the Alps on down, complete with recommended examples:
– We end at the beginning with the best that Provence has to offer: