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."