You might be thinking I’m mad to recommend a £69/$93 wine as a good-value wine of the week. I’m not. I’m also making no apologies for making yet another rosé (or another Tablas Creek wine – the pink sibling to Sam’s white, in fact) my wine of the week. The reasons are manifold. The wine is delicious. It’s the first time that this wine has been available in the UK. And, most importantly, it might well be the most sustainable rosé you can be drinking right now – even taking into consideration the long journey it’s made across the ocean.
The wine is, specifically, the Patelin de Tablas Rosé packaged in a 3-litre bag-in-box. The full box weighs in at 3,080 g, which equates to 770 g per 750 ml of wine with packaging. Most glass bottles I receive as samples weigh between 1,150 g and 1,450 g per 750 ml of wine; a recent arrival came in at 1,959 g. In fact, four bottles from that producer weighed over 7.1 kg – more than double the weight of the rosé bag-in-box for the same volume of wine.
Tablas Creek claims that this box offers an 84% reduction in carbon footprint compared with the equivalent amount of wine in four 750-ml glass bottles. That’s a hefty reduction of carbon. Furthermore, the box is made from unbleached, uncoloured cardboard, meaning that as well as being easily recyclable, you could peel off the labels and put it on your compost heap.
There are other big positives about this particular BiB. It’s surprisingly small – the width of a burgundy bottle and about an inch shorter. If you put two burgundy-shaped/sized bottles in your fridge, one behind the other, squished up as tight as possible, that would be about the room it takes up. So it fits easily into small fridges, most fridge doors, and into a small picnic backpack (you see, I think of everything!). The bag has been designed to deflate as you pour, so there is no oxygen ingress as the volume of wine decreases. Whether the wine will stay fresh for more than a few months is, quite frankly, moot – this is a wine for right now, simply because its drinkability score is off the charts.
As for value, a bottle of this rosé will set you back £23, so you’re saving £23, the price of a bottle, by buying one box instead of four bottles.
It’s a blend of 71% Grenache, 20% Mourvèdre, 8% Vermentino and 1% Counoise. Grapes are sourced, according to the label, from some of Paso Robles’ top Rhône-variety vineyards: 19% Lotierzo, 18% Whalerock, 16% San Miguel, 11% Dry Creek, 9% Nevarez, 8% Duas Terras, 6% Tofino, 5% Hollyhock, 5% Velo, 2% Beckwith, 1% Tablas Creek. It’s a vibrant copper-coral pink and it’s laden with fruit and cream, a cavalcade of red-apple skin, rose hip, raspberry and the tiny ping of alpine strawberries. The acidity is ripe and generous, curving through a broad-stroke sweep of hay-sweet creaminess. There is a touch of cinnamon, a nip of bitter marmalade towards the finish, and then finely chiselled grooves of rusty-iron tang focusing on the drawn-tight end point. It’s not just a highly gluggable pink – it’s also pretty complex and serious. Posh pink in a box … Glyndebourne here we come?
Because the wine is well structured with real substance, I thought it would be fun to try some pretty challenging food pairings. It was 30 °C (86 °F) and so salads were on the menu, but we’d also just got back from Galicia with a backpack stuffed with what might be some of the finest tinned seafood in the world, and a recent article on rose veal in Saveur had prompted me to buy some veal from the young couple practising regenerative farming down the road from us. So we peeled cans and peeled veg, chopped and sizzled and sliced a crazy fusion carnival of dishes to see what would work best with this yummy rosé.
Every damn thing was good with this rosé! The slick oil, unctuous sweetness and salty silk of Galician sardines, accompanied by a fennel and radish salad emphasised the wine’s raspberry fruit.
The harissa heat, white-tang of feta, root-earth sweetness of carrot, mint ping and gentle aniseed breathiness of cumin seeds brought out minerality, liquorice, spice and tension in the wine. The wine sailed through and over and the obstacles of the not-insubstantial heat of the harissa and the iron-earth smokiness of the paprika. We may have had a second glass …
The intensity of flavours in the salad of goat’s cheese, strawberry, watercress and apricot (laced with fresh lemon juice, pepper and olive oil) made the wine taste peppery, dry, orange-peel-bitter and almost Tavel-like, throwing a light on its texture. (Just adding, like a proud parent, that the strawberries, apricots and mint were all homegrown.)
The rather extraordinarily addictive combination of cherry tomatoes, toasted pumpkin seeds, raisins and mint with a garlicky, lemon and maple sryup tahini dressing would be challenging to the point of defeat for most wines. The Tablas rosé rose to the occasion with nonchalant aplomb.
Because I wanted to see if the wine could handle more than just tinned fish and salads, we tried it with rose veal: fillet and sirloin seared fast on very hot coals. This was a spectacular pairing. The wine melted into the meat. The meat melted into the wine. Carnivores would simply stop there, dribbling and dewy-eyed. (Anyone looking for a sustainable-beef option should contact a regenerative-farming dairy for environmentally friendly veal.)
And then we picked the first figs from our ever-sprawling-outwards fig tree (middle-aged-spread is this tree’s middle name) and literally smeared them with a rapidly melting Cricket St Thomas soft-rind goat’s cheese from Somerset, and our hearts were full. This is a wine that loves tangy cheese – the more melty, salty, tangy, the better.
Actually, that’s not quite the full story.
My favourite pairing was perhaps the least interesting – or the most, depending on your viewpoint. At the last minute, craving green, grassy bitterness (is this a symptom of heat shock?), I roughly sliced a cold green pepper and shoved the shards into a glass of rich, organic La Vialla olive oil. The intense green-on-green, thiol-on-thiol flavours seemed to make the wine taste headily sweet and accentuated every molecule of luscious red fruit and cream.
All I can say is (tongue in cheek, but not totally): save the planet this summer. Drink this pink.
Oh, and one other thing. If you’re having a picnic, you can unglue the top of the box and stick ice bricks in to keep it cool. I told you I think of everything.
The Wine Society are the exclusive UK importers and retailers (£69 per 3-litre box) and you can find it in the US from the Tablas Creek website and a few other retailers for between $89.95 and $95.
If you’re looking to reduce your own carbon footprint by buying wine that is packaged more sustainably, we have plenty of resources, advice and information.
