An Ode to Rosé

No really, there's poetry in this one

Valentine’s Day has come and gone, leaving in its wake a trail of deflated pink balloons and wilting roses strewn across city gutters. Though romantic love is the tune du jour, I’m drawn towards my first love in wine— Provence Rosé.

Photo by Poppie Pack on Unsplash

My relationship with rosé is tied to conversations of gender. As an 18 year old, I knew nothing about wine— but I knew what it felt like to negotiate my place in the world as a young woman. This drink with its delicate blushing hue and soft floral marketing became a symbolic object. It represented, in my mind, a soft femininity I’d spent my teenage years trying to both understand and reject. By drinking it, a woman could participate in ideas of femininity, and by abstaining, reject them.

The Rejection

My love for rosé began to unravel at two intersections. The first was its overt marketing to women—those whimsical floral labels, those absurdly shaped bottles, each one more of an affront to my evolving sense of womanhood. In the aisles of Dan Murphy’s, it became glaringly obvious that marketers assumed women were won over by nothing more than flowers, pastel palettes, and novelty glassware. Worse still, I realized it had worked. On me, on my friends, on my mother. In some small act of rebellion, I refused to drink rosé or white wine, clutching my tannic reds as though they were immune to the same kind of gendered manipulation. (Cue the eye roll.)

The second fracture came later, in my studies. By 2021, my palate had expanded—I was drinking whites from across the globe. But my studies, and perhaps the infamous words of Meg Brodtmann that rosé wines are “a waste of time” left an impression. Rosé wines were an afterthought in my studies, a byproduct, a convenient way to offload excess grapes deemed unworthy of more serious winemaking.

Rosé became a wine of broad strokes—simple, generic, unexamined. We did not study the influence of certain grape varieties, the influence of winemaking techniques on taste, or the different methods of quality assessment for rosé. These things were not worthy of attention. Despite the enormous global market for this style, it’s audience predominantly of women seemed to afford it the label of ‘unserious wine,’ unworthy of examination. In other words, it was simply…rosé.

The Breakup

With rosé dismissed as frivolous, I pivoted hard—drinking brooding reds and scorning 'girly' drinks. I was like Vivian Kensington in Legally Blonde, the serious, and far more boring, foil to Elle Wood’s unashamed frivolity. I wanted my tastes to be taken seriously: I didn’t think you could do that with pink drinks. It’s a little mortifying to admit that I had my first Cosmopolitan only this year, a drink I’d long dismissed as belonging to vapid millennial women. Internalised misogyny? Present and accounted for.

Before my ill-fated war on rosé—before I feared it might unravel some fragile noion of my own seriousness—I drank quite a bit of it. As often as my 19-year-old budget allowed, I splurged on the $25 'Côte des Roses' bottle, its base molded into the shape of a flower. My bedroom was cluttered with these bottles-cum-vases, desiccated local flora tumbling over the rim. I listened to a lot of Lana Del Rey back then and wrote a lot of poetry. During my anti-rosé crusading years, I sometimes felt envy for the women who, in the frank appreciation of their own taste, pursued ‘unserious drinks’ whilst I died a boring death on the hill of my own pride.

The Nostalgia

Time, as it tends to, reshaped my thinking. I’m less preoccupied with gender now than I was at 19, and more comfortable holding a marketer’s idea of femininity in tension with my own. So what if they’re right? Does the world end if I’m persuaded by pastels and peonies? I’ve already spent too much miserable time clawing for seriousness, as if joy were a lesser pursuit. I’d like to drink some rosé now, thank you.

In honor of my long-overdue reconciliation with rosé, I’ve decided to put my Literature degree to use—finally proving it was worth something—by composing an ode in the style of John Keats.

An Ode to Rosé (or, An Apology to My Younger Self)

O rosé! Thou art neither dusk nor dawn,
But some Byzantine dream, half-light, half-song.
A pigment caught 'twixt blood and bloom,
A gregarious muse in a crystal tomb.

I loved thee once, in youth’s embrace,
Before I learned of pride and taste.
Before I knew that pink could brand
A drink unfit for learned hands.

I scorned thy hue, too light, too sweet,
Thy bottles shaped for vain conceit.
With floral curls and pastel dreams,
A siren call for foolish schemes.

For drink must brood, must stain the lips,
Not prance with glee in dainty sips.
Rosé, I deemed, was but a ploy,
A careless trick, a fleeting toy.

Yet wisdom comes in magnum pour,
And I, repenting, beg thee more!
What weight has pride when joy is near?
Pour forth, dear wine, and drown my sneer.