From first blush, these wines are great deals
Rosés are made for summer; here is where you’ll find them
Other than air conditioning, there’s nothing better for making July and August in Houston tolerable than a cold glass of rosé. And no restaurant manager in town has had a more clear, uncluttered understanding of this in recent years than Shawn Virene at Brasserie 19, where today you’ll find 32 pink wines on his list.
Virene is an unapologetic purist, too. Because he runs a for-real brasserie, only French producers need apply. And the vast majority of his selections are from rosé heaven — Provence, the southern Rhone and Bandol. Only a select few restaurants in France itself can match Brasserie 19’s depth for drinking pink. Of course, restaurants in France rarely have to cope with Houston’s insufferable heat and humidity. As I sit here writing, I’m two weeks into my French sabbatical and have yet to experience a daily high north of 80 degrees.
Virene’s Clark Cooper Concepts colleague, Coppa general manager Josep Prats, is proudly riding the same bandwagon. Counting the dozen pink sparklers he has on offer in his Rice Village osteria, Prats’ wine list includes 38 rosé options. But he opted not to go Italian-centric despite Coppa’s cuisine. Nine countries are in the mix, including those white-grape bastions Germany and Austria, the former with a semisparkling portugeiser-pinot noir “seco” from Fritz Müller ($24) and the latter with Biohof Pratsch’s zweigelt-pinor noir Niederösterreich ($23).
Texas got a seat at Prats’ crowded table, too. Coppa offers the excellent Mont Sec rosé of grenache for $9 a glass and $24 for a bottle.
Note that such consumerfriendly prices are at both spots by and large the rule, not the exception. When chef Charles Clark and his buddy Grant Cooper forged their partnership around the turn of the century, they vowed to keep wine markups at a minimum and, to their credit, they’ve never strayed.
Virene’s “sommelier’s pick” from Domaine Rimauresq is one of 15 rosés he’s selling for $35 or less a bottle. No fewer than 29 of Prat’s pinks also come in at under $35, including the one he chose to feature, a Montalcino sangiovese from Il Poggione. To paraphrase Gershwin, summertime living in Houston at least becomes easier thanks to guys like these.