THINKING PINK
Rising rosé sales spawn spinoff economy of tourism, T-shirts and Instagram marketing
A week into Earls Restaurants’s summer rosé promotion, Dave Stansfield realized he was going to need more wine — a lot more wine.
Stansfield, corporate sommelier for the Vancouver-based restaurant chain, expected his new wine list featuring rosé from around the world to be popular. But popular turned out to be an understatement.
Rosé sales at Earls have grown 700 per cent from last summer, driving a total increase in wine sales of 25 per cent across the chain’s 70 locations.
“After the first week, we were like, ‘Holy crap,’” he said. “We had to get more rosé on the water from Europe, because we were going to run out.”
On Earls patios and at backyard barbecues, at vineyard wine tastings and bachelorette parties, rosé is being quaffed in quantities like never before. Skyrocketing North American sales of the photogenic pink drink have spawned an entire spinoff economy of tourism, T-shirts and Instagram marketing, not to mention more varieties of the wine than ever before.
Canadians purchased the equivalent of 21.2 million bottles of rosé in 2016, four million more than they bought five years ago, according to data from U.K. researcher Euromonitor. The 7.4-per-cent growth in rosé sales in 2016 over 2015 handily outpaced the country’s 4.1-per-cent growth in overall wine consumption.
Rosé has clearly entered the mainstream, enjoyed by people of all ages and genders, and the new drier, more complex varieties have trumped its outdated image as a sickly sweet discount pick.
“It was over there in a corner and once in a while we would drink it, a certain demographic that wanted sweet cougar juice,” Stansfield said. “But in North America, we’ve discovered it’s just another wine.”
In Europe, however, the trend is headed in the opposite direction: Sales of rosé are flat, but wine consumption overall is down as young people move away from the drinking traditions of their parents.
“Those long lunches where you have a bottle of wine over lunch, that’s just dead,” said James Wainscott, communications manager for Wine Intelligence Ltd., a U.K.based market research firm.
But if Europeans don’t want their own wine, North Americans are happy to step in and buy it.
France’s Provence region is well known for making the type of light, dry rosé the new world is going wild for and now exports 40 per cent of the pink wine it makes.
Other wine regions around the world are adding rosé to their offerings for the first time. You can buy rosés from South Africa and New Zealand, and Portugal is even experimenting with rosé ports.
There was a previous attempt at reviving rosé about 10 years ago by re-branding it “blush wine.” But Alan Middleton, a marketing professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto, points out it never took off for one simple reason: It was terrible.
“The only blush you got was from being seen drinking it,” he said. “The product didn’t really deliver.”
But like an aging pop star, rosé has now pulled off its improbable image makeover. To find out how, we turn to the summer of 2014 in the Hamptons, the tony summer seaside destination for New York City’s elite. In August that summer, the New York Post published tragic breaking news: “Rosé running dangerously low in the Hamptons,” because “the summering hordes have been tirelessly swilling all season long.”
People started searching for more information on the wine shortage that was sending New York’s high society into a panic.
Some of those searches brought them to the Instagram account @roseseason, run by 33-year-old finance professional Sarah Billstein.
Billstein started the account to promote her Etsy store, where she started selling T-shirts emblazoned with “It’s rosé season” after noticing the trend in the Hamptons herself. She watched her follower count spike after the publication of the Post article.
After a trip to France in the summer of 2015, Billstein decided to quit her finance job and make promoting the rosé lifestyle a fulltime job. With sales from her online store, event appearances and sponsored posts on her Instagram account, Billstein has been able to pull in about eight times more revenue this summer than she did last year.
Asked why rosé inspires people to broadcast their enthusiasm to the world through hashtags and tank top slogans, she has a concise answer. “It’s pretty people drinking pretty drinks in pretty places. And they want to Instagram it.”
Joshua Corea, co-owner of downtown Toronto wine bar Archive, agrees that rosé’s photogenic qualities have helped its popularity with young wine fans.
“I think Instagram has helped wine drinking in general, with people taking pictures of their bottles, showing through Instagram all their friends who are drinking wine,” he said. “It becomes cool.”
Rosé’s association with the Hamptons helps, too and professor Middleton was not surprised to learn the area was at the heart of the wine’s revival.
“There’s a status-conscious society if there ever was one,” he said. “You’ve got to be seen to be on the leading edge — ‘Oh, you mean you haven’t tried this nice little rosé from Argentina?’”
Indeed, Middleton recently participated in a similar exchange at a dinner party, persuading his friends to overcome their skepticism and try the rosé he brought.
Rosé has become a way for people to signal that they’re in the know — and cooler than those of a certain generation holding onto outdated ideas about the wine.
Drinking rosé also signals a certain conspicuous free-spiritedness: I am having a good time, I am off the clock, I am too chill to care if anyone thinks my pink drink is silly.
The most popular hashtags associated with rosé on social media tend to evoke a lighthearted escapism: “Rosé all day,” “Yes way rosé,” “Slay (i.e., kick butt; do a great job) then rosé.”
Because rosé is associated with pool loungers and patios rather than dimly lit bars, expressing a desire to drink it all day comes off as a flight of fancy, not a sign it’s time to check into rehab.
Aside from Instagramming their rosé, young people also love showing off their vacation destinations, and Canadian wineries are giving them plenty of opportunities to combine the two.
Del Rollo, chair of the Winery and Grower Alliance of Ontario, said rosé has given tourism in the province’s wine regions a bump. “It’s a wine that, in Ontario, we can make extremely well, with our cool climate,” Rollo said. “People want to come out and see where it’s grown and where it’s made and start to understand the different nuances.”
At Liquor Control Board of Ontario stores, sales of rosé carrying the Vintners Quality Alliance seal grew 47 per cent over the past 12 months compared to the previous year.
It’s hard to say how long the skyrocketing growth rates will last, but the wine industry seems to be taking inspiration from Billstein and her Instagram rosé empire.
“Finding a business model where I can slay AND rosé, rather than slay THEN rosé, makes me happy,” she said on her website.
After all, it’s always rosé season somewhere.