A Rose' So Divine They Call It Baby Jesus

[Celerity]

Over the last decade and a half, Ameztoi Rubentis has maintained one of the most loyal, and unlikely, cult followings in wine.

https://punchdrink.com/articles/ameztoi-txakoli-rose-so-divine-they-call-it-baby-jesus/



When Ameztoi Rubentis rolled up on these shores 15 years ago, there was nothing else like it. Irresistibly brisk, intentionally spritzy and the color of pink sand, Rubentis crossed the Atlantic from Spain’s Basque region, then relatively unknown to most American wine drinkers.

Not only was there nothing like Rubentis in the United States, there was nothing like it in Spain. Ignacio Ameztoi’s family has been making wine in the fishing village of Getaria for five generations, and until 2005, they’d exclusively made txakoli, the region’s signature, slightly effervescent, citrusy white wine, meant for drinking with abandon. He wanted to try something new.



In 2005, he called André Tamers of De Maison Selections, his U.S. importer, to get Tamers’ take on whether a rosé (rosado) txakoli, the first of its kind, might have a shot at success in the States. His family owned a small plot of very old—some 150 years old—red hondarrabi beltza vines in Zarautz, a small town that dangles over the Atlantic just east of Getaria. His idea was to blend the small amount of these red grapes with the region’s white hondarrabi zuri grape to make Basque Country’s first pink wine.

“What if I had a txakoli rosé and only sold it to you? Would you take 50 cases?” Tamers recalls asking the wine buyer at New York’s Casa Mono and Bar Jamón. At the time, Casa Mono was at the forefront of Spanish wine, and was an important stop for out-of-town sommeliers and lovers of the Iberian Peninsula. “Txakoli represented a new culture of Spain that wasn’t well known,” says Tamers. “And it was evidence that Spain didn’t just make 15 percent [alcohol] wines.”

snip

[RainCaster]

1. I thought this was going to be about a flower

Oh well.

[Orrex]

2. ...

?t=100

Narrator: Orrex chose instead to make a joke in hope of distracting from his utter ignorance of wine.

Narrator: He did not succeed.

[TlalocW]

3. I know nothing about wine

I don't even drink, but for some reason I have a raging hatred of sommeliers and the whole wine hoity-toity subculture. Perhaps it's because they've run experiments where sommeliers failed spectacularly at what they're supposed to be good at - for instance, getting the same white wine twice in a row but once with red food coloring added in and diagnosing (is diagnosing the right word? eh, screw it) it as two separate wines with wildly different characteristics so that makes it as much a scam to me as faith healers.

I'm not saying different wines don't taste different, and maybe one kind pairs better with whatever overpriced haute-cuisine abomination is the latest thing, but to imagine that another person can tell you what you like - how your taste buds are going to react - is just hooey. If you like a wine, drink it. If you have a favorite wine that goes with a dish, but somebody tells you they're wrong, tell them to screw off. Also, if I want pineapple on my pizza, I'll have pineapple on my pizza, you freakin' food snob.

Thus, my favorite Dave Barry column.

https://www.miamiherald.com/living/liv-columns-blogs/dave-barry/article1936835.html

[Orrex]

4. Doh! Paywall!

Believe me, I share your dislike of that whole culture, be it in wine or in art or in any other subjective pastime wherein the gatekeepers get to pass judgment on all who don't value the same subjective thing.

As for pineapple on pizza, I might shame you good-naturedly as an abomination, but you are welcome to partake. I don't dislike it out of food snobbery, but rather because I really don't care for that particular combination of flavors.