Winemaker Aaron Pott
| While few oenophiles would equate rosé with Bordeaux’ prestigious Right Bank, Blackbird winemaker Aaron Pott recalls a wonderful tradition from his days as winemaker at Chateau Troplong Mondot in St. Emillion, France. A tradition that started every autumn when caravans of gypsies would turn up for the harvest…
“Each family would arrive at the estate in nearly the same way, in a five year old Mercedes pulling a small trailer...They would arrive before daybreak, and they would pull grapes from the vines until twilight filtered into dusk. At the end of the day,” Pott remembers, “they would line up like Londoners after the tenth night of blitz bombing at a soup kitchen, tired and hungry with their giant gasoline-style plastic containers to obtain their pay, as well as the bonus.”
In Bordeaux, the gypsy bonus was a sort of ‘saignée’ wine, the first free-run juice blended liberally with water. “There is a wonderful French law that mandates that any person hired to work the harvest in France gets a certain amount of free wine each day. The amount varies with each region, seemingly getting larger in an inverse proportion to the quality of the wine growing area,” Pott says.
On harvest nights in Bordeaux, the liter of ‘rosé wine’ allotted to each crew member served as a reviving tonic, and the fatigue of the day would disappear into rising guitar vibrations, climbing bonfires and a swirl of women. As Pott recalls, “the fires were lit, the women would dance, the wine would be consumed, and a young English or German student would somehow lose his wallet.” In the morning there was always one less gypsy and one less student and rumors of danger and delight hanging in the still morning mist, all “fueled by one small liter of wine per citizen as mandated by the government of the Republic of France.”
Like those gypsy harvesters, Arriviste rosé possesses a surprising complexity. But, this is not a wine to break down, study and evaluate. After all, rosé has never been a wine to demystify; it has simply been a wine to delight in.
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