Rosé Popularity

On Sunday morning I did a segment on the weekend Today show about pairing wines with food (if they ever create a link to the video, I'll post it here). I finished my four-and-a-half minutes with a dry rosé—the 2005 Chateau d'Aqueria ($18) from Tavel—making the entirely defendable claim that rosé is one of the great, if not the great, all-purpose pairing wine. Goes with meat, goes with fish, goes with veggies, goes with Hostess Ding Dongs (well, no; in fact, for those you need a bota bag of Screaming Eagle). Anyway, you get the idea. Rosé just has an image problem, thanks to white Zinfandel. It'd be like if you were a charming, suave man about town with an identical twin brother who liked to hang around in front of the TV in his boxer shorts, eating Cheetos all day long, and people kept mistaking you for him. Or him for you. You get the point.

In any case, lo and behold, I arrive at work this morning to a newsflash (yes, there are wine newsflashes, believe it or not) reporting that the annual Nielsen Company's analysis of the retail beverage market shows that in 2006 sales of rosés priced above $6.50 rose a whopping 23.9%; rosé sparkling wine rose 42.9%. Sales of blush wines—the aforementioned scary twin brother—were flat, on the other hand.

Crikey, it's a movement. All we need now are banners and a song.