Cole - Ros all day: an essential guide to your new favorite wine

Rick Ross has a rap sheet. Tattoos cover nearly every centimeter of his body. His thick neck bears the weight of ten to twenty massive, heavy gold chains. He goes by aliases: The Bossor, as his adoring fans call him, The Bawseand Rozay.

These nicknames are fitting, because this rapper just so happens to love... ros.

Rozay has allied his personal brand with that of a pink sparkling wine from Provence, Luc Belaire. He composes rhymes about this fizzy drink. He makes music videos celebrating it.

Luc Belaire Rare Ros is mysteriously cloaked in opaque black glass. Some special-edition bottles have light-up labels so you can spot them across the dance floor. The Bosss homies, the Black Bottle Boys, periodically trot out in black varsity jackets emblazoned with the Luc Belaire motto.

Gentle readers, please try to imagine Tupac, Snoop Dogg, or Dr. Dre crooning about ros back in the early nineties. Snoop liked to roll down the street sipping gin and juice. Tupac was a Hennessy man. And wasnt it Dre who warned everyone, Dont Drink That Wine?

But fifteen or so years later, tough-guy performers are striking a different chord with their lyrics. Two in the morning Im zoned in / Them ros bottles foaming, raps hip-hop artist Flo Rida. Wiz Khalifa calls for ros in my Champagne glass. And then there is Rick Ross with his black bottle. Rozays ros entered sixty-six international markets in its first three years of existence, becoming the top-selling sparkling wine on Amazon.com. Between 2013 and 2014 alone, its sales grew by 340 percent, according to a Sovereign Brands spokesperson. Yes, that is correct.

ROS VS TOTAL TABLE WINE MARKET IN THE U.S. IN 2015

Ros is a pop-culture phenomenon. Ros is all the rage. And ros is, improbably, macho. Rick Ross the Boss, of all people, likes to unwind with pink bubbly.

So does everyone else. Sales of premium imported ros table wines (that is, decent, food-friendly wines priced higher than $11) shot up 58 percent in volume and 60 percent in value in the United States in 2015 alone, according to data provided by Nielsen and the Wine Market Council. Meanwhile, the total table wine market was

Ros is an entire category that offers excellent quality for the price and is nearly foolproof in food-pairing contexts. It can be made from any red grape variety (and many white grape varieties, too) in any winegrowing region. Its a sure winner.

Yet it is marginalized. Despite the fact that ros sales outstrip those of white wines in France, Business France, the French trade commission, categorizes French wine exports only by red, white, or sparkling. Contemporary media articles all follow roughly the same outlineIt used to be crap, but now its good, and its cool!failing to dig deeply into pink wines long, long, long history. Ros is rarely mentioned at wine symposiums or conferences, and a surprising number of winemakers I interviewed while researching this book told me that ros vinification was not a part of their education at oenology school.

I find it ironic that wine professionals have largely been ignoring ros when its what they need most. After years of tasting professionally, my palate is pooped. Im overwhelmed by an overabundance of flavor and tannin. At the end of a long day of wine-related work, I crave the crisp acidity and balanced proportions of a fine dry ros. It might not be the worlds most precious wine, but its the wine that makes me happiest in the moment and recharges my taste buds for tomorrow.

I would argue, too, that the wine-erati is missing out on ross intellectual prowess. Adherents to the holy trinity of pigment, concentration, and toasty oak might find ros to be a lightweight, half-baked sort of wine, but I find it to be relevant precisely because it is irreverent. A vin gris de grisa bona fide French rosis closely related to a northeastern Italian ramato, which is an outr orange wine. And there are entire avenues of winemaking techniques that are just now being explored in the ros sector.

Yet when I asked French winery owners to explain the recent windfall as I researched this book, many of them shrugged and responded, The women like it. The subtext being, Its just pretty.

Is this why ros isnt taken seriously by the wine trade? Because women think pink is pretty? As the fashion and beauty industries have proven, pink packaging resonates with female shoppers. And in the retail manufacturing world, a prevalent strategy for designing womens mass-market products is known as shrink it and pink it.

It is true that women tend to make their wine-buying decisions based on appearances, while men are more likely to be swayed by an impressive price or a shelf-talker (display tag) reporting a high score. Why? The answer cannot be reduced to a simple girls like pretty things. Rather, as advertisers and marketers have known for decades, women connect to wine socially and emotionally, while men like to collect, analyze, and brag about wine. Women seemed to focus more on the relationship element, whereas mens comments were more pragmatic, observes the author of a 2012 study of wine consumers published in the Journal of Wine Research. Men, the article states, are attracted to wines snob appeal, and are willing to pay more per bottle than women are, no matter what the occasion.

So men buy wine to show off their purchasing power, while women are scouring bottle-shop shelves thinking, Hmm, what should I give my friend for her birthday? Which wine should I bring to book club? What would make a great hostess gift? They are not choosing pink because its implicitly feminine, but because a ros wine is simply undeniably beautiful, an aesthetic confection swathed by savvy marketers in a crystal-clear bottle. Its value as a pretty thing is cashed in not as some sort of fashion accessory, but as an offering of friendship.

As a wine professional, I suppose I should advise you not to purchase a wine based on its looks. But Im also a woman who goes to book clubs and birthday dinners. And Im drawn to ros not because pink is feminine, but because it cheers me up, as do those apple blossoms that announce the arrival of spring, the promising glow of sunrise, the ripe peaches of summer. When I buy wine, I want a visual feast as well as a gustatory one, and I want that vision to be uplifting.

But as youll learn in , men increasingly want in on that good feeling. Thanks to Details magazine, we even have a term for this phenomenon: bros. Guys made up nearly half of ros consumers last time I checked.

Ros is white and red, masculine and feminine. It is yin and yang, high and low, chic and shabby. It is as agreeable to the classical-music crowd as it is to rappers. A Venn diagram separating red and white wine lovers is fat in the middle. Throw a party and youll notice that the pink wine disappears first.

Just ask the Rozay.

Rick Rosss favorite sparkling pink comes from the same marketing minds who brought us Armand de Brignac, aka Ace of Spades. Its provenance is cryptic (the website offers nothing but vague promotional speak), but Burgundy bubbly powerhouse Veuve Ambal, which produces a Provenal sparkling wine labeled Rivarose, appears to be behind the winemaking. As for the name, Im willing to bet that the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles served as inspiration. Luc Belaire Rare Ros is made from a blend of grapes thats mostly Syrah, but thats not the point. The point is: This wine is