Don’t mean this as an outright bashing thread, although I guess it has the potential for going in that direction.
At any rate, one of my favorite “bonus features” from Tanzer’s IWC is Josh Raynold’s annual rose’ round-up - I drink a decent amount of pink wine in the warmer months, and he’s always discussing producers I haven’t tried yet.
So I’m reading through the 2013 write-up, and one of the first wines I come across is Antica Terra’s rose - for $50 a bottle! And my first thought is who the heck is buying rose’ at $50 a bottle? I mean, it seems like rose’s current pricing sweetspot is somewhere between $18 and $25 - is there actually a market for this wine at twice the price?
Or is it in fact “sold” through the mailing list where the only way you can get access to your desired pinot noir allocation is to also buy the $50 rose’? And if that is the case and the PN is a highly desirable/strictly allocated wine, then I can guess I can understand the math in terms of rationalizing the purchase of the rose’ in order to ensure maximum allocations of the pinots.
The last Wine Spectator issue had a rose’ section, and there were some French one’s that were approaching $100. Hasn’t SQN produced a pricey rose’ as well??
Anyway, I find SO many great one’s for $10-25 that I have no need for those, but YMMV.
I admit to buying the 2011 Erratica rose. Mostly out of curiosity, after hearing Maggie Harrison talk about it on the GrapeRadio podcast, and also because I can’t get enough rose in my life.
IIRC, she talked about wanting to make a very different rose wine. Having drank two of the three bottles I bought, I think it’s pretty true that it’s a different rose from any other that I’ve had. Very complex, earthy and contemplative. So I think that she pulled it off.
Not sure I can totally say that it’s worth the $50 price tag. But it’s pretty tasty.
Typically rosé is made in one of two ways. Either it is pressed directly like a white wine, or bled from a fermenter destined for red wine during the first 24 hours. In this conventional sense, this is not rosé; but neither is it red or white. The liquid is macerated on the skins for a little over a week. Somewhere between the 6th and 8th day, the aromatics of the fermentation reach a peak of expression and fill the room with astonishing perfume. At this point, just before it becomes red wine, we siphon the juice from the fermenters and fill the barrels, where the juice finishes its fermentation and ages on the lees for a year before bottling.
I bought the 09 & 10, and liked them both a lot with food rather than alone. Not like any rose’ I’ve had in my pretty limited experience…a fuller experience without being heavy, fruity or dumb.
Antica terra is a list i dropped this past year. I like her wines, just couldn’t justify the outlay.
I always find it fascinating that we say some wines are “worth” a certain amount (e.g. $100+ cabs) vs. others that aren’t (e.g. roses). If a wine is that differentiating and rewarding, shouldn’t it be worth the higher price? Is it any harder to pick one grape vs. the other?
+1. I’ve had this once and it was a compelling wine. Not a typical quaffer of a rose, but reminded me of a wine from southern Italy: light bodied with some interesting aromatics and decent complexity. I’m not a buyer at $50, but would enjoy drinking more of it on someone else’s dime.
So it sits on the skins for a week, just like a lot of Pinot made here in Oregon. Fermentation is of course going on at during this time. Then right before it “becomes red”, it’s bled off…like a saignee rose…Did I read that right?
Basically you’re spending $50 for orange pinot noir, as far as I can tell.
Picking Nebbiolo from vertical slopes in Valtellina is much harder than the valley floor machine harvesting they do in Napa. Some grapes are harder to pick, for sure. That can be a factor, though labor intensive Valtellinas often cost less than mass produced Napa Cabs.
As far as white and rose vs. red, there are definite cost differences. White and rose wines generally require less elevage and are turned around for sale within a year from harvest. Red wines usually require new and used barrels, racking and storing until at least a couple years from harvest. At levels where scarcity and collectability are a major factor, this is largely irrelevant since production cost is such a small fraction of the sale price. But at more everyday price levels, there is no reason I’d pay a red wine price for a rose or white.
It does sound like an orange wine in many ways, though making a red as an orange wine seems like they’re just twisting a few knobs in terms of extraction and aromatics.
Well, they are doing just that. Fermentation is a great way to get extraction…so as I understand it, she’s just pulling her fermenting juice off its skins after a week and then barrel aging that for a year. I’m not an expert by any means, but that’s what I gleaned from the website. It doesn’t seem particularly revelatory either.
I did chuckle a bit at Bob Fleming’s response. BTW, Rich, given that you were privy to Maggie’s “vision” with respect to this rose’, how many bottles have you ordered since IPNC?
That said, although I’m not a buyer at that price, I started thinking about what I do have in the cellar and I guess this is really no different than my buying Valentini Trebbiano - if the vast majority of Italian Trebbiano is coming in at $20-30, why do I pay $75+ for Valentini?
My response would be that I do subjectively believe that Valentini’s version of the grape is truly distinctive, and in that way I justify my purchase. Given that both of the responses from the gents that actually bought and tried the Antica Terra wine (Marc & Chris) were somewhat “on the fence” in terms of the value proposition, I’m not sure what to make of that, but if they can sell it at that price, more power to them.
No $50+ rose for this buyer, unless it’s sparkling!
At the evening tasting, she was pouring a 2011 Antica Terra Ceras Pinot Noir. Didn’t even realize she had a high priced Rose (not that any of her wines are low priced). More power to her!
Interesting cellar technique. By 6 to 8 days, my still ambient soaking Pinot usually has most of the color it’s going to get. Note that aside from one pump over to mix and aerate after processing, I’m not touching the fermenters. Just checking the juice on a daily basis. No punchdowns until native ferment is happening in earnest. So I have to imagine this rose juice is red in color going into barrel, but maybe that color is fixed poorly and settles out, or maybe there’s fining with white lees to strip color.
Not suggesting anything Maggie’s doing, and I should probably just ask her. But very interested to know more about this process and what the juice is like at various stages along the way. I’ve tried a prior vintage and found this wine interesting.
Regarding price, I’m a little shocked at how people treat rose. In the line about why $50 rose when we can get plenty for $15 to $20, substitute rose for cabernet and doesn’t that sound odd? You could even ask - why a $150 cab when there are so many at $50? In this case, these grapes could make $50+ Pinot but because the juice is bled off early, it’s suddenly not worth the same money? Who knew how big a difference in value there is simply based on a few more days before you drain the fermenter!
You raise a fair point. It is a unique rose, it’s very high quality, and i believe the raw materials are equally of high quality. But I think that it’s unusual to see a rose at that price point. Maybe not quite the price disparity of, say, Screagle relative to other CA cabs, but any wine at the high end of the price range relative to its variety peers would, I think, generate a similar response of bemused curiosity.
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