The Tempier Test - When is great rosé worth it?

As summer starts to wane, I’ve been thinking a lot about rosé. One of Accent’s core missions has always been to fight for the underdog and to trumpet the wines that we believe everyone needs to know. It's hard to imagine rosé as an underdog at this point, given how far it's come culturally. But in a lot of ways, it still is one.

Most people have moved on from the old rule that white is for summer and red is for winter. Rosé, however, still seems consigned to its seasonal purgatory. Worse, there's a lingering belief that only the freshest vintage should ever be drunk, and that rosé, by nature, should be simple, cheap, and cheerful.

I have real sympathy for those instincts. After all, one of my favorite ways to drink rosé is by the glug by the pool. But I also believe rosé can and should be so much more. Not every bottle of rosé, of course, is "serious" enough to belong in a cellar. But neither is the vast majority of white and red wines on the market. Great rosé, though, can and should age. I recently had the good fortune to taste a ten-vintage vertical from Bandol's Domaine Tempier (a legendary estate once declared by Robert Parker to have made "the greatest rosé in the world”) and it was genuinely beguiling to see how profound a vintage like the 2014 has become with time.

The Tempier Test

Speaking of Tempier: someone recently reminded me of a silly little exercise I like to call the "Tempier Test.

Domaine Tempier Rosé is, without question, a benchmark of the category — and it's not inexpensive, at roughly $50 a bottle on the shelf. A few years ago it was arguably the most expensive rosé on the market. Back at the height of 2020 quarantine, I decided to spend some money supporting a friend's newly-opened wine business and bought a $50 bottle of rosé I'd never heard of, purely because they were excited about it. After tasting it, my honest reaction was: "I guess it's fine. For $50, I wish I'd just bought Tempier.”

Thus, the Tempier Test. I don't think rosé has to be cheap. But if you're going to charge as much as the global benchmark, the wine had better be worth it. (I'm sympathetic to the argument that it costs more to run a young startup winery than a generational property. This test is born more from being a consumer fed up with rising prices everywhere than from any purist stance as a wine steward.) The test is simple: if a bottle costs as much or more than Tempier, where's the value proposition? The one obvious exception is availability — Tempier rosé is notoriously allocated. At the shop, we're lucky to get a case a year.

Acing the Test

It's with the Tempier Test in mind that I remember first tasting Sylvain Pataille's Marsannay Rosé a few years back. Three bottles came in as part of an allocation, landing at $100 each. I liked Sylvain's wines generally, so I took the allocation, although I was dubious about a $100 rosé. I opened a bottle. 

Wow.

I was stunned. The bottle seemed to transcend my understanding of rosé as a category. It wasn’t just rosé. It was quite simply a remarkable bottle of Burgundy. It wasn’t a white Burgundy. It wasn’t a red Burgundy. Nevertheless it still immediately tasted like a great bottle of Burgundy. A few weeks ago I opened another bottle for 3 Master Sommeliers who were all of the same assessment. The wine transcends its own category, which is an indelible mark of a truly great wine. The bottle aced the test, in my mind well worth being twice the price of Tempier. 

Why Are We Surprised Rosé Can Be Great?

A philosophical question: why should we be surprised that rosé is capable of being truly great? We already accept that whites can be every bit as profound as red wines, but why not reds? Put another way, why is rosé so often viewed as inferior to other kinds of wines? To answer that question, we should probably step back in time a bit and talk about the history of rosé. 

A History of Rosé

Rosé is nearly as old as wine itself. In fact, the earliest winemaking in the ancient Mediterranean predates any real separation of grapes by color — red and white grapes were often grown together in the same field and pressed together. During harvest, workers would crush red and white grapes together with their feet, holding onto suspended ropes for balance. The juice would then be placed into pithoi, large ceramic containers. This pink juice was off-dry and bitter from contact with the grape skins, seeds, and stems. 

It wasn't until the Greeks — and later the Romans — began deliberately separating red and white grapes that red and white wine emerged as distinct categories. Even then, early red wines tended to be tannic and difficult to drink, so for a long time the general preference stayed with lighter-colored wines. Rosé wasn't a niche back then — it was closer to the default way people drank wine for centuries. Wine (usually diluted heavily with water, which lightened its color considerably) was also a practical necessity for purifying drinking water all the way through the Middle Ages, which helped keep pale, diluted wine as the everyday norm rather than the exception.

In around 600 BCE, Greek colonists from Phocaea (in present-day Turkey) sailed west and founded a settlement on the southern coast of what is now France, naming it Massalia (this settlement would eventually become modern-day Marseille). The vineyards the Phocaeans planted were field blends of red and white grapes, and the resulting pink wines became known throughout the Mediterranean. That makes Provence the oldest wine-producing region in France, with it’s emphasis on rosé production stretching back 2600 years.

Fast forward to the 19th century: Provence becomes a popular summer vacation destination for French tourists, who sip glasses of chilled rosé while taking a break from swimming and games of Pétanque. This begins our modern association of rosé with summer and relaxation. In America, we had our first taste of Provence rosé starting in 1938 when Domaine Ott started exporting rosé to the United States. Our interest slowly increased over the next few decades with endorsements by celebrity chefs like Jacques Pepin and Julia Child. For the next several decades, however, dry rosé was little more than a curiosity for those living on the coast, especially after the introduction of sweet blush wines like white Mateus and Beringer White Zinfandel. 

Thanks to the hard work of pioneering importers like Kermit Lynch, however, rosé slowly grew and grew until the cultural moment of today. The success of rosé, however, is still indelibly linked to summer leisure. For their part, Provence has done nothing to dissuade us of this idea, as they continue to promote it as they sell an ocean of inoffensive quaffable juice. 

Rosé, of course, can be so much more. As summer starts to dwindle, we'd urge you to give well-made rosé a place at the table year-round, not just as a poolside treat.