“Is any pink wine worth $100? There’s a musical genre from the late ’70s/early ’80s dubbed yacht rock: smooth, heavilyproduced music made by virtuoso musicians in expensive recording studios. “Think Steely Dan, Hall & Oates and the Doobie Brothers. And to drink on your yacht with such music? There can be only one candidate: Provençal rosé, the more expensive the better.

“You can’t “miss these wines in your local store. They come in a bewildering array of bottles resembling amphorae and bowling pins, with squaredoff shoulders and some even entirely square. “Then there’s the distinctive color: Provençal rosés have to be as pale as possible. It’s all a far cry from when I worked in a wine shop in the late ’90s when rosé was white Zinfandel, bright red “Spanish rosado or sickly sweet rosé d’Anjou. Nobody would have dreamed of spending more than $10 on a bottle.

“In contrast, yacht rosés (I’m trying to coin a new genre) can sell for up $100 for the Chateau d’Esclans Garrus. It sounds outrageous but this is a drop in the ocean for the producer’s target “market… Other names to look out for include Minuty, Domaine Ott, Chateau Gassier, MiP (made in Provence) and Miraval. …Indeed, yacht rosé shares some similarities with Champagne; they both sell on image as much as content…”

To read the full article, click here.