Yay for Rosé

I picked up a bottle of Rosé yesterday. It was inexpensive, refreshing when cooled, food friendly, and delicious. But, while the winery name on the label is not even really a winery and you might think that would make this wine pretty pedestrian.

Often times, Rosés are simple wines made of a single grape variety of which the winery just has too much. Or, in an even worse case, a winery has grapes of one or more varieites that are not good enough to make into a red wine, so they try to salvage what they can out of those grapes to make whatever wines they can.

Not so in Provence, the home of the most famous Rosés in the world. There, they grow the grapes to make Rosé. And, in the case of this wine, they blended eight different grapes to make a really stunning wine to go with shrimp for about $10 for a bottle. In order, by variety, this wine had Grenache Noir (the grape usually just called Grenache, Cinsault, Carignan, Syrah, Tibouren (an unusual grape rarely grown outside of Provence), Ugni Blanc (the predominant grape in Cognac), Vermentino (typically an Italian grape), and Syrah.

Dry and refreshing with lots of fruit and high acidity, these are the hallmarks of a great Rosé. And, great Rosés do pair well with lots of food. But, while for you, they might be that wine that you drink on a Saturday afternoon in the summer because you don't like the bloat of beer anymore, if you've never had Rosé with shrimp -- cocktail, sauteed, broiled, fried -- it's about time you try.

As I have spent a good part of the last year screaming out loud, with wine, and frankly with most everything else, it's not usually about how much you spend, but about how wisely you spend. Rosé is a great warm weather beverage and you don't have to spend a lot.

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