June Gloom Be Damned!

“Hello, Mr. Summer, when are you planning on arriving?”

Think we are all waiting and as I write this just over a week before our annual June Rosé Fest, you know the one where we pour like gallons of icy cold, new release French rosés and serve them with grilled lamb, roasted potatoes and carrots and buckets of pungent homemade aioli?  Oh, and alongside the regular offerings of paté, salami, artisanal cheese and bread?  

Yeah, that one.

We are just over a week away and the cold gray sky is peering over my shoulder making my already dark laptop screen harder to pluck away at.  Just how are we supposed to get into the rosé spirit with the weather we’ve had so far?  A collective willing of it?! I’m in if you are, people.

Each year there are more and more dry rosés released into the marketplace.  Shows like those you see on the Bravo Channel splashing these pink wines around so often, and on so many shows, that the general public began a curiosity, a thirst to try what all those housewives and Hamptons summering folks were drinking.  Not you all, mind you.

We’ve been told for decades that we have the coolest and most forward-thinking customers, and one of the very first mentions of such was due to the droves of you who not only showed an early willingness to try the dry rosés from the South of France but your fervor in devouring them.  While those housewives were still sipping Kendall Jackson Chardonnay, you all were buying cases of rosé to drink all summer long.  Beyond hipsters, my friends, you might as well go ahead and think of yourselves as innovators.

It is because of Randy’s determination to get people to try these wines, and your ferocious embrace of them that we are one of, if not the first, retailer importers come to with their rosés.  

To put things in perspective, I’ve tasted nearly 300 rosés since January.  January!  Importers shaking baby rosés from their slumber, (about 3 months earlier than should be) to rush them sample and to market in January, just so they can be there first to get placements in retail stores and on restaurant wine lists.  Well, if that isn’t an indicator as to the swelling popularity of these wines than I don’t know what is.  I’ve been soaking in “pink wine” for months now and our rose mountain is now stuffed to swollen, ready for our annual Rosé Fest and for your summer sipping pleasure, should summer ever decide to show up.

2017 was a very solid but short vintage, many producers in Provence losing 30% or more of their harvest.  That, coupled with this swollen demand and, well, let me just urge you to find the ones you like and stock up now, summer weather be damned.