Wines That Stand In Their Own Sun: The Rosé Wines To Drink All Summer Long

Let me kick off the first official week of summer, and summer wine tasting, with an unorthodox and possibly irresponsible version of a wine tasting note.

It comes from a virtual tasting a few months ago with winemaker Kathy Joseph of Fiddlehead Cellars in Santa Barbara County, California, as we tried her “Happy Canyon” Sauvignon Blanc from a vintage (2016) whose conditions would have burdened most winemakers with stumbling block after stumbling block.

“Nonetheless,” I wrote in the tasting note, “Joseph steered the wine to an expression that was, to my palate, unique for its completeness and self-assurance. [Here’s where the tasting note might start sounding a little weird.] This was not an aspirational wine. It was not designed to evolve into something else at a later time. This wine met you where you stood, even while standing in its own sun.”

That tasting note has been on my mind this past week, for two reasons.

One reason is that it sets the tone for wines I would like to drink all summer long: self-assured, complete right now, and standing in their own sun. I realize that you cannot necessarily taste completeness or smell self-assurance or feel the warm glow of sunshine in your glass. But I believe you can sense the firm imprint of a winemaker with a confident grasp of ownership of their decisions throughout the winemaking process, most particularly when there are challenging forks in the road and difficult choices that need to be made along the way.

Which brings me to the second reason why that unorthodox and possibly irresponsible tasting note has been on my mind: I believe that some wines, some special wines, reflect the personality and the frame of mind of their makers. I believe you can taste the difference between a winemaker who is generically “passionate” about their work and one who is deeply satisfied by it.

Those, too, are the wines I would like to drink all this summer long: those that manage to reflect the personality of their makers, when their makers have made the journey from “passion” to deep satisfaction with their results. Such wines are not, admittedly, populating every shelf of every wine shop. They take time to identify, patience to learn, and effort to unearth.

Call it a scavenger hunt, but for wines that stand in their own sun.

A fun twist, on this Tuesday after the first long holiday weekend of the summer? We can play this “scavenger hunt” game with the most popular wines of the season, namely, rosé wines that are in fact populating nearly every shelf of every wine shop (and nearly every wine list of every restaurant) right now. Rosé wines may not leap to mind as most reflective of their deeply satisfied makers, but I can attest to the substantive nature of a particular selection of them, namely the Chiaretto rosé wines from the Bardolino commune of Italy, near Lake Garda in the Veneto region near Verona, that I visited earlier this year and have written about previously.

Wines that stand in their own sun? These are those, for sure.

Wines that are due, perhaps, for more attention and reconsideration? In my opinion, yes. They are also worth seeking out, scavenger hunt-style.

Here are three tips (and the reasons behind them) to point you in the right direction.

Look for Wines that Have Aged in the Bottle

Many wine consumers shopping for their next bottle of rosé tend to focus far less on the vintage of the bottle (which, generally speaking, has usually been produced from the most recent harvest or two) and far more on the color of the wine, from the palest cotton candy pink to the nearly-clichéd “salmon” to an unusual pale copper that is just this side of orange. When it comes to rosé, color rather than vintage is most often the deciding factor for consumers.

But these past few years, influenced both by the COVID pandemic and supply chain challenges, a deeper “bench” of vintages of rosé has become a more noticeable and frequent occurrence on the shelves, giving us an opportunity to compare not only a range of rosé hues but also a range of vintages, from harvests dating one or two years ago to three and four. Within that range, the same producer may have experimented with a variety of closures such as cork and Stelvin.

When you’re in the shop and facing the line-up of those multiple varieties of rosé wine colors, notice for a change the different vintages especially if they go a few years back. Sample a few. The results may surprise you.

Winemaker and grower Giovanna Tantini, for example, believes that the best time for Chiaretto is after it’s had time to evolve in the bottle. (”Il Rosé” is her most widely available wine in the US.) A multi-year tasting of her wines, and the food pairings that go along with them, bears this out. The most recent 2022s, for example, are enjoyed best as an apertif and served with lighter meats and fish. The older 2020s, on the other hand, can stand up to richer cheeses and stronger-flavored fish. The 2018s present the sharpest contrast of all both in terms of taste and appearance, due largely to its aging in the bottle under cork whereas the younger vintages experienced Stelvin closures and less aging in the bottle.

These are intentional, assured wines that have stepped into their own place in the sun. Their appeal can be uniquely appreciated in relation to earlier vintages of themselves.

Look for “Wine to Drink with the Bowl”

There is a visual flair to the wines from the Marchesini family, from quirky graphics throughout their branding to the color of their savory 2022 Chiaretto that reminded me of a mid-summer nectarine whose surface layer of skin has been slit and carved away, thinly and almost translucently, by the sharpest paring knife. But the most resonant and deceptively easy description belongs to Marcello Marchesini who describes the Chiaretto as “wine to drink with the bowl” rather than a typical glass. There may be more wine consumed from a bowl in terms of volume, but the experience of wine drunk from a bowl is counterintuitively intimate and humble. It is also respectful of the wine that is allowed (enabled, in fact) to be fully and only itself.

Look for Wine at the Human Scale

Part and parcel of wine that shows the satisfaction of their makers is that it was also made very deliberately, and often at a smaller scale in order to calibrate nature’s variability methodically and with purpose. For Cantina Il Pignetto, to the southeast of Lake Garda, that translates into a winery at a human scale. Tanks are not all the way full. There is noticeably less mechanization. It takes a month’s work to harvest seven hectares of vines. And there is the patience of the elders: the longer Il Pignetto can wait until bottling the better. The longer the wine can stay in the bottle until sold or opened, also the better.

Silvia Morando, the younger and next generation of ownership at the winery, pays homage to those elders in her desire not to revolutionize anything. But that doesn’t mean things stay status quo. Morando herself is enrolled in a special Master’s degree program at the University of Udine focused on supply chain management, digitalization, and international business. For her, though, change is more a matter of culture and less a matter of technology.

That deliberate and respectful action, even while flowing with the trade of Chiaretto whose international sales have swelled exponentially in recent years, is like finding the solace of shade under a full-leaf tree when the sun elsewhere is hot and bright. Il Pignetto’s 2021 Chiaretto has found its spot in the sun, between its tang of summer strawberry touched by a drop from local honeycomb. But it’s a spot in the sun with the assurance (and the solace) of lineage, culture and satisfaction nearby.