Call me Rosé. This is my story.
I don’t claim to have had a more interesting life in wine than either of my fellow travellers, Red and White, nor do I profess to have had as much fun as my old pal Fizzy (a hearty partier, if there ever was one!). But it has been quite a ride all the same, and when Knopf offered me a fat advance to spill it all, well, how could I refuse?
I can, I think, legitimately assert that I predate Red, White, and Fizzy, too, since, at the outset — we’re talking eight thousand years ago now — wine was just a mashup of anything that would ferment. So, no Red or White as distinct categories, just a pot of something with a look that was not unlike the one I often wear today, only murkier. I suppose this is tantamount to admitting that I was an accident of sorts, but, hey, I’m still here and going strong, which is more than I can say for Atlantis or the Colossus of Rhodes. Isn’t that what counts?
One of the things I’ve observed in my long, pink life is how things tend to get more organized and deliberate as time goes by. Wine began as a pretty haphazard thing, all right, but little by little, it become more of a specialized, professional pursuit than annual harvest blowout with hell to pay in the headache department afterward. Over the centuries, things settled down quite a bit. This was the era when I parted with Red and White, at least for a while, and we went our separate ways. It was also the moment when The Quality came to prefer their wine either red or white, not some uncertain, in-between, neither-this-nor-that sort of color, and I fell rather out of favor.
It didn’t help that when the elder Cato, that stingy old sourpuss, wrote his treatise on farming in the third century BCE (it seems like only yesterday) in which he recommended re-fermenting the exhausted residue of the wine press to make a barely alcoholic, pale, wine-like beverage to quench the thirst of field hands and household slaves. It became known as piquette, but they could just as well have called it pinkette. As I look back on it, this represented a turning point in my fortunes, and not for the better. In the public imagination, I became distinctly déclassé. Unsavory associations do no one any good. But you would know that.
Yet, it’s a long road that has no turning, and when the Romans took their Empire out for a walk across the Alps and into the heartland of northern Europe, they brought vines along — at first just to show that they were there to stay, only later discovering that good wine could be made in France (of all unlikely places). But in the short summers and slanting sun of the north, red grapes couldn’t get as red as they did in Mediterranean climes. The resulting wine was — how to put this modestly? — various shades of disarmingly fetching, roseate pink.
The following centuries were, so to speak, halcyon days for Yours Truly; the sunny uplands of my career, when Bordeaux, that beacon of French good taste, pumped me out in massive quantities. By the 13th century, under the Angevins, Bordeaux was shipping so much of me into England, the Low Countries and Baltic realms that it took an entire merchant fleet to carry it to its thirsty destinations. My charmingly pale, appealingly gastronomic and refreshing self was scarcely six weeks old. Today, we would call it rosé nouveau. To them, it was claret.
Yet, it’s a long road that has no turning (have I mentioned this?). By the 1970’s the Brits had succumbed to the voluptuous if somewhat blowsy charms of cheap, dark, red imports from Chile and Australia, places where wine ripened fully with shameless speed and achieved (excuse the vernacular here) goosed-up alcohols. Suddenly no one knew claret’s name anymore (or at least pretended not to), with the exception of those Oxbridge colleges where they had been squirreling the stuff away since Henry VIII — a dear old soul and only occasionally homicidal — was in short pants.
But just as the New World was busy alienating the affections of Old Blighty, the Old World was, as if to balance accounts, reaching out across The Pond. About the time postwar American graduate students in their thousands were returning from wine-soaked junior years abroad, the canny Portuguese were mounting a vigorous assault on the American wine market, armed with a brace of branded, off-dry, lowish alcohol, silly-drinkable rosés named Mateus and Lancers (Kids, your boomer grandparents will fill you in on the boozy details). I have to leave something for the book, after all.
In my much-anticipated, upcoming memoir (a bit of history, a bit of kiss-and-tell) you’ll also encounter White Zinfandel, the California growler-format “blush” craze, and enjoy a fly-on-the-wall perspective as Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and myself frolic in the deep end of the pool at Château Miraval.
My story may not always be rosy. But it is unfailingly pink.
– Ghost written by Stephen Meuse