Oh, pink wine. People are so nasty about you. I would know: I used to be one of them. Pink wine conjures images of your trashy aunt pouring Splenda in the chardonnay at the country club because they didn’t have white zinfandel. I was totally willing to pile on before I discovered my grave error.
My child, there is another way.
Full disclosure: I picked this one for this week since it’s the 4th of July still kind of and look at the cute label!
I’m here to tell you that there’s about nothing nicer than an ice-cold glass of the good stuff on your porch in the summer. I had a change of heart about rose a couple years ago when a slightly older, very chic friend of mine made this her signature summer drink. That seemed all fine and good, but she had somehow also managed to talk her boyfriend into this. Not to say that women have suspect palates, but you’re going to be hard-pressed to find a straight man sipping pink wine in a public place unless it is really really good. I figured they were on to something, and whatever, I kinda wanted to be just like them.
So I dug around, tried a bunch, and this here is the place to start on the path to rose enlightenment. The 2012 Charles and Charles Rose clocks in at about $12 a bottle and is a nice syrah/mourvedre blend with a touch of grenache and cinsault thrown in for good measure. You get a good hit of strawberries and roses and maybe a little cherry on the nose, but it rounds itself out with some kind of…I don’t know…herbal minerality? It’s not too sweet, contrary to what your previous encounters with this sort of thing might have been like.
It’s easy to imagine yourself sipping this over a late dinner of a grilled halibut steak and then turning to your dreamy companion and being like, “hey, let’s just run naked in to the ocean” and so you grab the remaindered bottle and do just that. Even if you live in Kentucky (landlocked), are single (kinda weird to do alone and weirder to do with your imaginary friend), and actually eating Chicken of the Sea (because hey, halibut is expensive). Just a thought experiment.
So have you tried this? What are your thoughts on Charles Smith wines? What are your feelings on rose? Come on, I want a fight in the comments.
