Light Whites and Rose Arise

I have seen it with my very eyes people, wine drinkers asking for light dry white wine and crisp rose with vigor and confidence. The cultural cross over we are in the midst of is a natural progression. The wine drinkers of America have moved from only special occasion wine drinking to daily pleasure sipping, and as a result there has been a move away from larger bodied flabby wines towards single vineyard refinement and acidity. We are awash in butter recovery treatments on a day to day basis, and the currently recommended cure is to administer six to twelve ounces of crisp clean well balanced wine orally twice a day and maybe a crumble of good goat cheese and some roasted shelled pistachios. Tell me that ain’t the cure for the summer wine blues. Want to know why your big reds and rich whites don’t taste as good in the summer as they do in the cooler months. Your brain and palate are trying to tell you something, “I am dehydrated and thirsty and want refreshment”. Alcohol will dehydrate you. Get your guests a light social beverage with lively apps, and the night will be a hit, serve full throttle high extraction all night and you get the chair throwing Springer episode. As my wife and I have entertained over the years, we have turned cooking hour before dinner into a light crisp white and rose drinking hour. It has encouraged people to arrive early and help cook, arrive late and you might miss out on the Billecart Brut Salmon Rose and Tsar Nicolai California Select Osetra Caviar, or the Priest Ranch 2009 Estate Sauvignon Blanc and Tomales Bay Miyagi Oysters. Think light whites and roses for the best palate cleansing, all encompassing appetizer complementing, heat from the chili poppers begging to be quenched beverage. Everybody on the planet where, A it gets wicked hot, and B grapes grow nearby, produces a light crisp white and rose to beat the heat. It is almost universal.
One of my favorite phrases in the wine world is the technique described as saignee, a French phrase meaning to bleed. As we strive for higher extraction, read higher sugar less water, we achieve an imbalance in the fermenting grape must which will achieve an undesirable level of alcohol in the finished wine. If you open the valves at the bottom of the fermentation tanks about twelve hours after being loaded with fresh grapes, and take the resulting pink and rose colored liquid into another vessel and allow to ferment dry, you then replace the equal volume of water to pink run off and you have effectively reduced the alcohol level by dilution without sacrificing quality. Some jokingly refer to this as, “Post harvest irrigation”, or “The Jesus share”, as you have just turned water into wine. You have improved the quality of two wines at the same time, lowering the alcohol to a more pleasant level in one, and created a light crisp rose in the other, the mythical win-win. More and more wineries have began to create purposeful rose instead of a byproduct concept, which has in turn elevated the quality, which in turn brings more people into enjoying them, which in turn encourages more wineries to produce them. There is an old tale that suggests rose was the invention of Spanish men. They created it so as to claim to still be drinking a manly red wine in the heat of summer, rather than a girly white. So as we say here in the valley, “Sometimes you have to be man enough to drink pink.”
You, the wine drinker, are an integral part in the availability of better and better quality wine. If you refuse to drink bad wine, they will no longer produce them in vast quantities. And people if you are producing roses with over 14 percent alcohol shame on you that is not what rose is meant for. I would like to drink a whole bottle to my head without the face down in the pool effect. For years California Sauvignon Blanc was thought of as a light white wine, but as the years have gone by it has emerged as a medium bodied wine, but always showed crisper by comparison to the butter bombs of the past, and the price has increased with the body of the wine. A call to arms for rose and light white drinkers, we don’t need ripe wine at 14+ percent alcohol in our spring summer whites, give us flavor with 12 ½ to 13 percent and refresh me. I am more likely to drink two to three bottles of crisp clean wine and sip on one richer bigger wine. Okay that last one was total vapor. I am just as likely to open multiple bottles of whatever I have on hand as my thirst dictates. But as the summer rages on there are some great values to be had in the light crisp white and rose realm that are ready to please.