The wine everyone's drinking | thearticle

I never knew Provence as a boy. My first brush with the region came as a student. I had a friend who took me home to his parents, who lived about half an hour east of Draguignan, near the

Gorges du Verdon. His father had a few nice bottles of wine in his cellar, but for the main the family drank the rosé wine they bought in plastic _cubitainers_ from their neighbour Marius,

whose wife Rose, made a decent goats’ cheese as well. Marius’s wine was drinkable (just). He was a man of few words but I managed to wheedle some out of him once, in the course of which he

revealed his ambition to achieve AOC status for his wine. For little men like Marius that was a proper mountain to climb. My friend showed me the coast too, from Saint Tropez to Nice, but it

was a few years before I found myself in a world that exposed me to the top hotels and restaurants on the Côte d’Azur. A girl who had been brought up in a more luxurious lifestyle than

mine, introduced me to Ott wines with their strange, skittle-like bottles and giddy price-tags. In Provence she informed me, one drank Ott! Ott made red and white wines, but it was the rosé

that excited the Parisians who descended on the coast in the spring or autumn. The summer was too hot (or ‘Ott’). In their eyes, that season was reserved for plebs. Provence made good whites

and better reds, but there was a logic to drinking rosé: it worked when the sun was up, when there were no constraints imposed by the office and you could treat yourself to a relaxed

three-hour lunch. You wanted a wine you could chill; and you wanted something that could do justice to the strong tastes which made the region famous, not just Mediterranean vegetables and

herbs, but aromatics like garlic or saffron. Aubergines and tomatoes drenched in olive oil, spicy bouillabaisse soup with its garlicky ‘rouille’, ‘brandade de morue’ – salt cod emulsified

with olive oil – or aïoli (garlic mayonnaise) with poached fish; and then there were imports from North Africa, brought home by the French _pieds noirs_ colonialists and the native _harkis_

who served them: couscous and merguez sausages. Rosé worked well with the ubiquitous pizza too, especially when it was doused in piquant oil, fortified with chillies. They were all foods too

strong for a sophisticated white or red, but with a good rosé they went down a treat. Rosé starts life as a red wine: the juice of black grapes racked off its skins before it has taken on

more than a glimmer of colour, or indeed most of the flavours associated with southern French cultivars like Grenache, Syrah, Carignan or Cinsault. I still like a drop of rosé. When I get to

the Domaine des Anges in September I am generally disappointed to find it has sold out during the summer. I can’t drink a full-bodied red wine as an aperitif, but I can drink rosé. Rosé has

changed too: it has got paler, so that the pink tinge can often be hard to spot. It appears that rosé producers are becoming daily more refined in their tastes. For the first time since the

Seventies, rosé is ultra-fashionable. If a recent trip to Antibes is anything to go by, on the Côte d’Azur you would hardly know they made any other wine. Provencal rosé has also gone

global and as such it has diverged somewhat from the gastronomy of the region. Take Mirabeau, for example, which comes from the region behind Saint Tropez and his made by an Englishman,

Stephen Cronk and his family. The 2019 Etoile is the palest salmon pink with a pear-drop aroma that points to a very low-temperature fermentation. The structure is good and the wine discreet

and delicate but I wondered whether it would actually have the power to deal with strong-flavoured foods? Château Saint-Croix ‘Charmeur’ comes from Carcès west of Draguignan. I had the 2019

with some salmon I served with a beurre manié containing a particularly fierce Kenyan red pepper. Again the dominant flavour was pears, but there was both more colour and power and it was

not defeated by the sauce. Gérard Depardieu’s friend Bernard Magrez’s rosé — L’Excellence des Muraires – comes from Le Luc and has a predictably over-the-top bottle. The pears were

conference pears and the wine had real guts. I didn’t make an aïoli, but I was confident it would know how to deal with it. I liked the 2018 Le Grand Cros Espirit de Provence less once I saw

the price. It comes from a good home: the Massif des Maures behind Saint Tropez. I marked it down as a wine for the ‘brandade de morue’, the salt cod I would ideally consume for Friday

lunch. It was bigger, deeper in colour and (not in any way to denigrate it) coarser than most of the others. The 2019 Terre des Anges  is made by Château Paradis north of Aix. The mainstay

of the wine is Cabernet Sauvignon, which makes very good rosé and this was no exception. I also set it a rude test in the form of some devilled lambs’ kidneys. Certainly no wimp, it proved

to be the most muscular of the wines to date and yet it was not lacking in elegance. Last up was the 2019 Rosalie from the Domaine Terre de Mistral from Rousset just east of Aix. It came in

the worst bottle of all: something that looked like a magnum of cheap scent. Appearances are often deceptive and Rosalie led with a distinctly different approach to the usual cold-ferment

‘pear’ nose. The aroma was distinctly catty and that rusticity went well with the garlicky merguez sausages I served with it. Despite that pungency, there was a good structure and excellent

length. I appreciate a wine that lies close to the soil.