No Way Rose

How I came to choke on a pink, syrupy ocean of my own making.

- Jay McInerney

I think last summer tipped me over the edge. Maybe it was all the “Rosé All Day” T-shirts or

the “Rosé S’il Vous Plait” sweatshirts or the “Stop and Smell the Rosé” baseball caps. Granted, my antipathy was sometimes aggravated by the fact that I had drunk too much cheap rosé the night before at some garden party or movie screening in the Hamptons where the only other wine on offer was prosecco. Ouch. Rosé may look pretty in the glass, but a cheap rosé hangover is an ugly beast. Maybe it’s the residual sugar, or maybe it’s just the fact that the average rosé is so insipid that I drank 18 glasses without noticing it at the time. This summer I’m having “No Way Rosé” T-shirts printed for my friends.

In summers past I was an advocate of rosé as a summertime quaff, specifically the dry rosés of the Côtes de Provence, Bandol, and Tavel. When I tried to persuade my dinner guests to drink rosé, they looked at me with pity, or even horror, amazed that an alleged wine aficionado would try to make them drink pink wine. I explained, to little avail, that rosé was the official summer beverage of the Côte d’Azur.

Over the years I have written several columns encouraging readers to drink pink, drawing a distinction between the sweet pink beverage known, somewhat anomalously, as white zinfandel (the best-selling wine category in the States) and the drier, more complex rosés produced in Provence and Spain. White zin had given the whole pink category a bad name, and I wanted to draw attention to the simple pleasures of the crisp, onionskin-colored wine that I had discovered on a trip to the South of France. My first rosé was a bottle of

Domaines Ott that I consumed with a bouillabaisse at the late, lamented Tetou, the venerable seafood shack in Golfe-Juan that