What I Drank on My Summer Vacation

"One car, two people, 22 states, 38 days, 8,053.1 miles, and a purely decorative wooden oar." To that summary of my summer, I'm pleased to add this photo. We took with us, distributed to our hosts, and in a continuing fit of self-abnegation drank not a drop of until the final day of this total trip -- a case of Unti rosé.

Hold a case of Unti in your hands someday. It feels this good.

We called it the "people, not places or things" tour of the USA, and we saw a lot of good friends and tiny family members. Still, of course we made time for the important things, such as wine. 

We resisted buying a lot of the regional wine which, in surprise #1 of this trip, has sprung up seemingly everywhere. Kansas has its own wine. Why shouldn't it? Kansas is a notoriously good place to grow plants. And many, many years from now, when Kansans have learned how to make wine without adding so much sugar and weird chemicals, let's drink some. I'm extrapolating, I admit it. Like I said, we didn't try any of the Kansas, Iowa, Ohio, Wisconsin, etc. product, not even the one simply titled "White Lady" wine. 

The hat equivalent of a Denver rosé tasting.

Surprise #2 of this trip: Everyone drinks rosé wine, all over the country, all the time. Look at Amendment 21 Wines in Denver. They have in-store rosé tastings. Unfortunately, those events, as illustrated by the store's website, are spastically heteronormative and pointlessly gendered, staffed by women in fuchsia dresses and cotton-candy pink feather boas. Those two things don't even not clash! Unsurprise #1: Americans neither have nor want any dignity, or any way to communicate with each other that doesn't involve tackily selling one another products on the flimsy platform of the very first stupid thing those products remind them of. Other countries are not always like this, USA.


Regardless of my opinions, this joint sells tons of good wine off the dedicated and illuminated rosé wall, and I myself bought a bunch. We had to drive through Utah after that, I was cornered, I had to. It was great! I got that super pale one toward the right, there, which I wanted to love for its iconoclasm, but really it was bland. It was French, just for the record.

Also, I had a rosé flight in Carrboro, North Carolina in a lovely, really beautiful restaurant. Unfortunately, all I remember about the experience is that my dinner partner, at whose house we stayed for three days, is amazing (She's an Anthropology professor at Duke University and she studies in Guatemala a lot which makes her very, very resilient on account of all the harsh death.) Also, we both agreed that the good one was the expensive one, and that it was of pinot noir.

And I was served rosé in Milwaukee by my wonderful hostess who remembered it was my favorite. She and her tugboat-captain husband went on to introduce us to mini-bowling, as well as the arms race that is Wisconsin bloody-mary decoration, which involves cheeseburgers and beerbacking.

Summer sausage, cheese, a prawn, and ... a slider. With the so-Wisconsin touch of a beer back, not shown.

 And in Cloverdale, Indiana, in the worst possible crap motel and accompanied by criminal pizza, I thanked myself for having provisioned us with the amazing, barely effervescent, rocky, fruity-juicy Biohof Pratsch rosé from Austria. You can drink this magical wine under better circumstances, I hope. Unsurprise #2: Do not for any reason eat pizza in Cloverdale, Indiana.

Next post: New York City, where the streets run pink.

What's Really Beyond the Thunderdome, Or, Everybody Gets A Rosé

Another quick moment to notice a rockstar drinking rosé ... um, and her friend, there. And how happy is that guy? He looks gratifyingly like he's about to fall over from the wonder of it all. I want to be that guy.

Mini-Post: We Are Now Officially A Rock Star Beverage

 NEWS FLASH -- KIM GORDON DRINKS ROSÉ

The actual news is that she's leaving Thurston Moore, which is too bad -- I guess? None of my beeswax, really. This women's magazine interview is not really my thing, as well. However:

"'We have all these books, records, and art and are getting it all assessed; that’s what is taking so long,' she says after ordering a glass of rosé. But both have moved on. Among her suitors are a restaurateur, an architect, and an actor. 'It’s just weird,' Gordon says of navigating new romance. 'I can’t tell what’s normal.'"

Who can, Kim? We wish you the best. 

I Fight Sweet

I know you can't read the writing in this photo, but the glow is so nice! Scroll down for legibility.

I'm in a fight here -- a fight against sweetness. In the United States of America, the color pink is associated with qualities including softness, femininity, and artificial berry flavor. And I get it; flower petals are pink sometimes. And although I'm sort of skeeved out every time I see small girls wearing all pink, I get that too. It is a super pretty color for your t-shirt/pants/tutu/sparkle-tennies ensemble. Likewise, I love strawberry soda -- I live in this country and I grew up drinking strawberry soda, a fact that holds enormous meaning for good reasons as well as dumb ones. Back to wine:

Provence* rosés generally taste like steel, raw beef, and rocks. I'm avoiding "wine words" because I don't know very much about them, or else I don't like them. So: Metal, meat, and stone -- these are all heavy, hard things, the opposite of the pink I've just described. (Get Freudian if you want to; I don't want to.)

Great! Not sweet! But you're saying no, shaking your head, pretending to gag. You say those are disgusting flavors for summer wine. And they would be, if it weren't for the priceless alchemical genius of the vinting process, which takes all that clunk and turns it -- light. Rosé is light in color, light in "weight," and light in flavor, as opposed to a syrupy chardonnay, for example. The reason I love rosé so much is that I believe it to be supernatural, chaotic-good, because it lightens something heavy.

The result is unobvious. If the winemaking process lightened something already light -- something simple or sweet -- then it would just be silly like strawberry soda. (Unless it were idiotic, like white zinfandel.) But because something happens between yard and bottle that transforms those bossy, lumbering flavors into a floating wisp of a thing, the wine becomes both honest and interesting.

I was extremely fortunate and got to eat dinner this week at the Liberty Café in Bernal Heights, San Francisco, California. I had a glass of Henri Bourgeois rosé of Pinot Noir that inspired me to write on the tablecloth. (Paper, it was paper, I'm not awful.) But I couldn't work out what I wanted to say so I made a ... chart? Outline? Anyway they let me keep the tablepaper, which you see in situ above and legible below.

*This should say "Provence-style," because of course I'm talking about United Statesian as well as French bottles here. And I specify them, because the other ones, the rosés of syrah, the Italian and Italian-inspired rosés, and the Spanish and Spanish-inspired ones, those delicacies are for a future time.

Introductions: Two to Rosé and One to Me

The most important thing to know about rosé: 

Beautiful men drink bottles of it at sunset in the south of France. 

In fact, everyone drinks bottles of it at sunset in the south of France. For those wondering where I get my nerve, I'm an expert on rosé because I drink more than my fair share of the stuff, but also because I've been to Biarritz, where I took this photo. It's too bad you can't see Spain's Trois couronnes mountains just off Bruno's left shoulder there, but I was drinking bottles of wine at the time. Regardless, here is a photo of the wine's homeland as well as the ritualistic, ancient rites of rosé wine, birthright of anyone who wants to drink some.

The next most important thing to know about rosé wine is that it's dry. The word rosé itself means the wine will not be sweet; you are safe. I don't like sweet wine; I don't like vodka that tastes like marshmallows, either. I like wine that tastes like wine: fermented grapes, their dirt, and complications. My palate is debased, I admit it, and I tend to drink the cheapest wine I can -- often, in the wine-rich region of the San Francisco Bay Area, this means something worth far more than the $3.99 I often pay for it. But it always meets the specifications above, it's always real wine. Not "blush," not "white zinfandel," and although I recognize this may have once been a real thing, not moscato either. There are pink things that come in jugs. I don't know what they are, but I don't go for them either. (I'll drink the reds and the whites from a jug. Or I have, anyway. Oh, shoot. I have drank the pink jug too. No one's innocent.) All those products are dishonest attempts to "get" people, mainly women, to drink their sludge. Let's not be interested in any of that.

Now for me: I'm not a fan of pink wine because it's pink. I don't really like pink for pink's sake. Pink has a lot of problems. I don't wear pink. I wear black, and I'm not girly or sparkly or primped or polished. I truly love those who are! But in my world, those things mean you're a feminine gay man oftener than they mean you're a woman who thinks she's acting normal. That's what I mean by a black heart: To me dark is beautiful, losing weight is a tool of the man, and I'm not going to pretend I'm rich. I'm a writer by trade, trying to tell a truth, so you won't find marketing hype here either. Until next time, here's me wearing black and drinking pink in Saint-Jean-de-Luz.

Pink wine with a black heart

Welcome! Please find reviews, stories, and other love for rosé wine, with an emphasis on the emergence of California pinks. I have reverence for the sunset rituals of Biarritz and deep sympathy for anyone who's ever had white zinfandel inside their mouth.

I'm a longtime culture writer who's been evangelizing rosé for the past several years. The day I got laid off after eight and a half years at an alt-weekly, I told everyone not to worry about me, because I was going to start a blog about rosé wine. That was only a year and a half ago!

Many thanks to novelist Rayme Waters, who took me to my very first wine tasting three days ago, and to the pretty waitress at Zazu who said "I'd read that."