The wine news in Europe last month was lively, fresh, concentrated, and had a lingering aftertaste. It was also, surprisingly, mostly pink. Considering that the last time pink wine got our attention was in the early ‘70s when Sutter Home introduced a new wine called White Zinfandel, the news was a novelty.
It began with a big-bang headline: “U.S. wines outsell French due to the rise of rosé,” announced Britain’s Daily Telegraph. Then came two polls: One showed the number of “regular wine drinkers” who admitted to drinking rosé had risen by more than 60 percent; the other, conducted by the prestigious British wine magazine Decanter, said 70 percent of its readers considered rosé a serious wine. One of Britain’s biggest supermarket chains now stocks 40 different rosés. Sales over here rose from £114 million ($173 million) to £200 million ($303 million and change).
As your grandmother said, you can catch more flies with sugar than vinegar, and this honeypot quickly buzzed with interested marketers. The loudest noise came from the European Union, which in the name of “wine reform” (another way of saying there’s a lot of cheap wine sloshing around Europe, unsold) proposed changing the rules to permit rosé to be made by mixing red and white wine, rather than bothering with the other time-consuming, and more costly, methods. Winemakers in southern France, where most of the rosé comes from, were outraged. One called it “the battle for rosé’s nobility,” adding, “try mixing white wine with red – it comes out orange and doesn’t taste good.” Another, with typical French restraint, called such mixed wines “artificial” and the idea “insane.” The Italian winemakers around Lake Garda, whose light Bardolino is a sort of Valpolicella with training wheels, joined in, calling it a “humiliation” for wine consumers and even “the entire wine world.” The French Agriculture Department proposed a ban on mixed wines, and the World Trade Organization got involved. (In case you’re wondering, the Wine Institute, representing California wine, is pretty relaxed about it, as people tend to be when things are going their way.)
Well, with all these opinions bouncing around, I wasn’t going to be left behind, was I? This one was easy, a no-brainer – on one side, petty bureaucrats from the European Union, big companies, and marketing types determined to turn wine into a commodity, and on the other, honest artisans, traditionalists, little family guys close to the soil. That was the group I’d join on the barricades, armed with as many words as I could carry, ready to fight the good fight against corporate dumbing-down …
My wife interrupted my reverie. “Supper’s ready,” she called, “and I don’t want to miss the Eurovision Song Contest, so come on.” Every year, when this fantastical extravaganza of musical Eurotrash is televised, we go through the same routine: I complain about the decline of Western civilization, and my wife ignores me. She thinks the fact that Abba got their start here proves its intrinsic worth, while I take a more rational view (although I did find the Turkish rock ‘n’ roll belly-dancing troupe rather fetching). When I told her what I’d been ruminating about – the noble effort to defend another corner of the wine world against the forces of ignorance, she just giggled.
“Rosé?” she finally said when she got her breath. “You were actually thinking about rosé? What were you going to defend, that banal Beaujolais Rosé you dumped into the chicken stew last week, or the bland Rioja Rosé you boiled down for a sauce base the week before? Or the wonderful Domaine Tempier Bandol Rosé and Planeta Cerasuolo you inhaled so easily with the barbecued spareribs on Sunday?” And of course she started giggling again.
I would have responded in depth, but my attention was caught by an act from one of those countries that used to be part of Yugoslavia, a big-voiced waif dancing with a guy (I think) wrapped in blue cellophane. The house of wine has many rooms, I realized, and the one that’s done up all in pink is like the Eurovision Song Contest: Gaudy, irrelevant, and unstoppable. No champions need apply – they’re irrelevant, too.
