Rosé appears to have aged among the French like a fine wine
philosophy in a bottle of wine than in all the books in the world,” said Louis Pasteur, a 19th-century French chemist. For the French, wine is not just a drink or source of alcohol: it is a mark of civilisation, a subject of scholarship, a way of life. So why in the land of fine wines is rosé, the industry’s poor cousin, enjoying such a boom?
On the slopes of a forested hillside close to Mont Ventoux, the Domaine de la Verrière is one of the highest vineyards in Provence. Among the Chêne Bleu wines it produces, predominantly from hand-picked grenache and syrah, is a premium organic rosé. By July this year, for the first time, the estate had sold out of last year’s vintage. “Our rosé sales are now constrained by supply,” says Danielle Rolet, whose family owns the vineyard.
Why the French craze for rosé? One answer is the change in diets. In recent years even the French have begun to eat less steak and other red meat, which they traditionally accompany with red. As a simpler—and, the purists would say, blander—wine, rosé is seen as a lighter drink, particularly when chilled in summer. It is especially popular among the under-25s, the age group most likely to be vegetarian, according to the Organisation Internationale de la Vigne et du Vin.
A second, and perhaps more surprising, reason is the emergence of winemakers seeking to take rosé upmarket. A bottle of top-end Garrus rosé from the Château d’Esclans, a Provençal wine estate, for instance, sells at an improbable €100 . Such wines, or so their producers hope, are helping to lend rosé the cachet it has lacked until now.
And then there is the celebrity image. Almost all the Côtes de Provence wines, made along France’s Mediterranean fringe, are rosés. For millennials, the pale pink hue, backlit by sun, is considered highly “Instagrammable”. “It’s a fashion that has come up from Saint-Tropez,” says a winemaker farther inland, dismissively. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie own the Château de Miraval in Provence, which produces a premium rosé.
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