Chateau de Trinquevedel Tavel Rosé

The Flavors... A rosé for when you grow weary of flippancy. Trinquedevel has gravity. It exists, the flavors do not dart off your tongue into nothing. And I don’t just mean that it is heavy. I mean that it is a really good refreshing wine that is balanced instead of being sharp, is dry but also refreshing: it is a rosé that surpasses in intellectual interest the majority of red wines I taste. And the finish lingers in that cool linear to-a-point-on-the-horizon way that I am helpless to describe but seems to exist for every great wine, regardless of color.

The Estate… oozes solidity, class, French hauteur. Trinquevedel is an 18th-century country house among 32 hectares of vineyard near Nîmes. In 1936 Eugène Demoulin returned to the gone-to-seed estate of his childhood. He planted Grenache, Cinsault, and Clairette in the estate’s sandy, rocky soils.  Today his great-grandson farms these fields to create traditional AOC Tavel rosé.

The Wine… The vines used for this rosé are on average 30 years old. The wine is a blend of 44% Grenache, 28% Cinsault, 15% Clairette, 5% Grenache Blanc, 3% Syrah, 3% Bourboulenc, and 2% Mourvèdre. Grass is allowed to grow between the rows of these vineyards to discourage excessive yield. Typical yield for this wine is 34 hectoliters per hectare. The grapes are picked during the coolest hours of the day and fermented in a temperature-controlled environment at 63 degrees Farenheit. The wine is kept in concrete tanks prior to bottling. Clearly the goal of all this is to preserve freshness, but it is no- table that Trinquevedel (and many other) Tavel rosé does not have to be consumed in the first rosy, fruity moments of its youth. According to the estate, keeping bottles for three years or longer brings out spicy characteristics, and is recommended.