Yes Way Rosé. - Yes Way Rosé: a guide to the pink wine state of mind

Copyright 2019 Erica Blumenthal and Nikki Huganir

Photography 2019 Sara Kerens

Illustrations 2019 Whitney Pollett

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First Edition: April 2019

Published by Running Press, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Running Press name and logo is a trademark of the Hachette Book Group.

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Illustrations and photographs copyright Whitney Pollett and Sara Kerens except those are courtesy of the @YesWayRose Instagram account.

Food styling by Maria del Mar Cuadra and prop styling by Chelsea Maruskin.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018963582

ISBNs: 978-0-7624-9312-8 (hardcover), 978-0-7624-9311-1 (ebook), 978-0-7624-9604-4 (Target Edition)

E3-20190315-JV-NF-ORI

To Nikki. Love, Erica.

To Erica. Love, Nikki.

Ros Literall Changed Our Lives

If were having a glass of ros by eleven a.m., we know were doing something right. This has never been truer than on one sunny, sixty-five-degree morning in the fall of 2017, when we found ourselves in the South of France tasting ten newly harvested ros blends. The lineup ranged in color from barely there pink to ruby, and the glasses were tinged with flavor profiles from fruit forward to savory. Our mission was to narrow down these options to just one that would become the official Yes Way Ros wine. After several rounds of tasting and eliminating, we landed on a beautiful, dry, blush-hued ros with notes of strawberry, citrus, and white peach. In that moment, elated because we knew we were going to have a French wine we absolutely loved as our signature ros, we jumped up and down and waved our hands in the air in the middle of the winery, dancing like we were at the club. Our dream of creating a wine of our own was finally becoming a realit.

Weve been coming up with funny dances together since we were fourteen years old at the small school we both attended in Baltimore. Good friends throughout our formative high school years, we bonded over many things, including a shared crush on Brian Austin Green of Beverly Hills, 90210 fame. Back then, we never anticipated that fifteen years later we would run a business together.

After going our separate ways for college, we both found our way to New York City. One summer afternoon we ran into each other on the street in SoHo. At that time, Erica was working as a fashion editor at Jane magazine, and she helped Nikki land an internship in the design department. We picked up our friendship right where wed left off, quickly becoming a dynamic duoif we do say so ourselveshanging out after work and on the weekends. We had an easygoing rapport and similar interests in fashion, music, and art.

Weekend life back then went a little something like this: Meet for dinner, usually at Lil Frankies in the East Village, order wine that we could pronounce, check out a friends band, and see where the night would take us. At bars and concerts, we ordered Jack and gingers or vodka sodas. We both worked in publishing and lived in New York, so we drank whatever was cheap or, even better, free. What was actually in our glasses was not a priority. Then, everything changed.

Enter ros.

We wish we could remember the first glass we had, the first bottle we shared, or the first time we joked about our love for ros. We had no idea that those moments would change our lives forever. We know it was sometime in 2011, most likely at a Fashion Week party or a caf on the Bowery. Archived Gchat conversations (may they rest in peace) indicate that was the year we developed a passion for ros and began heading to wine stores specifically to buy it.

Without looking for it, we had found our drink and our calling.

By the summer of 2012, we were on the brink of obsession, drinking pink winealways from Provencealmost exclusively. Erica nicknamed ros Summer Water because it went down almost too easily. From there, the ros puns flowed. An early example: Im right on top of that, Ros, a riff on the 1991 cinematic masterpiece Dont Tell Mom the Babysitters Dead. Coming up with these jokes was a source of endless laughter for us, and our friends couldnt get enough of them. This was the first sign that we were on to something.

At the same time, we sought out restaurants that had ros on the menu and lamented the fact that it wasnt available at every single place we went. Why didnt our regular spots have a house ros, we wondered, like the standard red and white? Ros became our main topic of conversation with anyone who would listen. We just couldnt get past the fact that a drink could be simultaneously so delicious and so beautiful. Plus, we could afford it. Ros is accessible, even inexpensive, compared to a lot of wine, but it feels luxurious and chic. Just the thought of ros made us giddy. Without looking for it, we had found our drink and our calling. Completely infatuated, by summer 2013 we felt compelled to share our love for ros with the world at large. We took to Instagram, where we could showcase the beauty of ros, while using our inside jokes as captions to lend a playful voice. A relatively new social media channel, Instagram was still on the rise at that time and not yet a destination for launching brands; it was cool, like something our moms had never heard of. Instagram was the place to let our love of ros shine for the world, and it was obvious to us that we should use the handle Yes Way Ros to spread our message on the platform.