In the 2010 film The Ghost Writer, the protagonist, played by Ewan McGregor, says he’s never seen the point of white wine; well, for a long time, I didn't really see the point of rosé. It was somewhere between white and red wine, and I thought it was inferior to both.
A recent, excellent bottle of Tavel somewhat mollified me, however, so I approached The Wines of Provence with interest and an open mind. (I realise that Tavel is in the Rhône Valley, but let’s not split hairs.) Moreover, as the authors observe in the concluding chapter of this book, ‘one thing has always been clear: Provence is more than rosé.’
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Like a batsman playing himself in, the book takes a bit of time to hits its stride. There’s an obligatory opening chapter about ‘Provence History’, which I really didn’t find very diverting. ‘No shortage of actors, film stars and directors have been attracted to the area for holidays’ was one of the rather desperate observations I highlighted in my copy.
Things start to pick up when the writers, Elizabeth Gabay MW and Ben Bernheim, move on to ‘The Business of Provence Wine.’ I think this is a really fascinating subject. There have been some visionary people involved in the marketing of Provence rosé, and the brilliance of the labelling and the design of the bottles turns out to be less of a modern phenomenon than I assumed. The curvy Domaines Ott bottle and the sublime Clos Cibonne label have long histories, I learned.
Unusually for a book in The Classic Wine Library series, the producer profiles are frequently more interesting than the sections about the regions where the grapes are grown. There’s a good reason for this: I’d never heard of areas like Pierrefeu or Notre-Dame-des-Anges, but the names of brands like Minuty, Mirabeau and Miraval were familiar to me. Even so, too much of the book is devoted to describing estates whose wines drinkers will never see or taste, even if they travel to the south of France.
Reflecting my preference for reds and whites, I thought the parts about Bandol and Cassis were the highlights of the book. The latter has an air of mystery about it: a diminutive coastal appellation, one of the first to be awarded AOC status in 1936, expensive, and as rare as hen’s teeth.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bottle of Cassis, but the whites - 'soft, rich' and 'sometimes flabby' - sound very appealing. It is ‘clearly the region for white wine in Provence’, according to the authors, with Marsanne and Clairette, those stalwarts of the Rhône Valley, the principal grapes.
This is a good book, by two people who clearly know their stuff and write well. I think it may be a hard sell, unfortunately, as the majority of drinkers of La Vieille Ferme and Whispering Angel probably don't give a monkey's about things like grapes and terroir.
While that may be true of wine drinkers in general, there's usually a market of specialists for these books. Dare I say, though, that most people working in the trade probably don't drink Provence rosé?
