This condescension didn’t apply to all rosé, obviously, because the first rule for being snobbish about anything is that you make lots of rules and you make them complicated for outsiders to understand. So two rosés did get the seal of approval from those oenophiles. One was Bandol, an expensive pale pink from a specific part of Provence. The other was Tavel, the very dark rosé from the southern Rhône that was served at the court of Louis XIV in the eighteenth century and praised by the writer Balzac.
It wasn’t just wine bores who behaved oddly around rosé in those unenlightened times, either. I had a male friend who loved rosé from the Côtes de Provence and endured titters of disdain each time he ordered it in a restaurant or bar as if, somehow, rosé was only supposed to be drunk by laydeez. I hope he now enjoys the smugness of being ahead of his time.
Today Provence rosé is a highly fashionable aspirational brand, just like champagne. It owes much of the turnaround in its reputation to Sacha Lichine, an entrepreneur best known as the creator of Whispering Angel.
The son of a Russian emigré, Lichine was born in Margaux, in Bordeaux, and educated in the U.S. When he bought Château d’Esclans in Provence in 2006, his vision was as bold as it was clear. He wanted to make serious rosé – “a lot of winemakers said [then] that rosé is sort of Coca Cola wine” – and he wanted to sell it as a luxury product in America. Lichine knew what needed to be done in the winery. He was also a marketing machine, selling, with each glass, the St Tropez blue sky, superyacht dream.
“The most important thing we did,” he once told me, when I asked how he set about building Whispering Angel as a sought-after brand, “Was to get it in people’s mouths. At one point, we had 400 consumer events going on, just in the US.”