National Post (National Edition)
Rosé outlook
WINE INDUSTRY ABLUSH AS CANADIANS QUAFF THE PINK DRINK IN RECORD AMOUNTS
CANADIANS QUAFFING THE PINK WINE IN RECORD AMOUNTS.
Aweek into Earls Restaurants’ summer rosé promotion, Dave Stansfield realized he was going to need more wine — a lot more wine.
Stansfield, corporate sommelier for the Vancouverbased 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-percent growth in rosé sales in 2016 over 2015 handily outpaced the country’s 4.1-percent growth in overall wine consumption.
Rosé has clearly entered the mainstream, enjoyed by all ages and genders, and the new drier, more complex varieties have trumped its outdated image as a sickly sweet discount pick.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 of 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 particularly 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 rebranding 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 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 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 2015, Billstein quit her finance job to make promoting the rosé lifestyle a full-time job. With sales from her online store, event appearances and sponsored posts on her Instagram account, she has pulled 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 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 freespiritedness: 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.
Matt Dixon, vice-president of sales at Colio Estate Wines, said he’s noticed a new rosé at almost every Ontario winery he visits.
Colio’s Girls Night Out brand is the LCBO’s best-selling VQA rosé, with sales up 35 per cent over last year.
“People graduate up from drinking flavoured wines to drinking table wines,” Dixon said. “They’re familiar with the Girls’ Night Out brand. So they’ll go up to the VQA wines and often the first stop is rosé.”
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.
IT’S A WINE THAT, IN ONTARIO, WE CAN MAKE EXTREMELY WELL, WITH OUR COOL CLIMATE. PEOPLE WANT TO COME OUT AND SEE WHERE IT’S GROWN AND WHERE IT’S MADE. — DEL ROLLO