Wine of the Week: Our Daily Wines 2017 Rosé

Wine of the Week:

2017 Rosé from @OurDailyWines, made in Sonoma, California.

While I was looking forward to enjoying this wine and love to support proudly vegan and organic wines, this particular bottle/batch/year thoroughly disappointed. Straight out of the bottle, a short-lived strawberry aroma emerges yet a decidedly sourdough bread starter (not the bread, but the starter… if you know, you know. If not, think vinegar and vomit) taste washes over the tongue. It’s yeasty. As an avid bread-consumer and appreciator, I can attest that it’s not the pleasant kind of yeasty. It’s not even a beer level of yeasty, but rather that acrid smell that collects when one’s sourdough bread starter is still in the liquidy yet later fermenting stage of production. With air and a couple of minutes, the sourness became all-encompassing. The initial strawberry scent quickly faded to that sharp, sourdough-starter aroma that never went away.

This is a simultaneously mild and acetous wine. The astringency surrounds while a soap/shampoo flavor lingers in the background. Despite the sourness, it’s generally watery with little complexity and a blandly flat finish.

With a somewhat dry but fleeting texture and a distinct acidity on the nose coupled with a diluted wash throughout the mouth, this wine was off-putting and fairly confounding. Tried among three, the unanimous consensus was that this bottle tasted bad. I think that either this batch was faulty or, more likely, the grocery store’s preservation and storing methods (or lack thereof) heavily contributed to the poor quality and experience that this bottle rendered. This being the hypothesis, I am interested in trying more from Our Daily Wines from a different vendor and with an open mind in future tastings.

On a more positive note, Our Daily Wines makes vegan, organic, and sulfite-free wines and strives for sustainable winemaking processes. These facts are clearly labeled on each bottle as well as mentioned on their website and social media accounts.

Price

$9.99 @sprouts.

ABV

12.5%

Meal pairing

Tried alone.

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Fun fact

While repopularized more recently, Rosé has been around for centuries as one of the first, predominantly-made wines (and was highly coveted in the middle ages). Unlike white wines, Rosé comes into contact with the stems and grape skins (pomace) during the maceration process. This doesn’t categorize it as a red wine, however, because the skins and stems aren’t left to soak in the juice as done with red wines. In the middle ages, this was usually done by squishing grapes by hand (which thereby allowed some pigment to bleed from the grape skins into the wine-juice during preparation). This method has been since updated, somewhat comparable to making coffee or tea in which the pomace is briefly left to “steep” in the grape juice yet removed before fermentation begins. In addition to this initial method of skin-contact Rosé production, other methods of creating Rosé includes blending red and white wines to create a pink-hued beverage and diluting a portion of a red during the production process to create a separate batch of Rosé. Normally described as a refreshing, estival drink, Rosé can be made sweet or dry (such as Rieslings) and can possess light-fruit tasting notes such as cantaloupe, mango, raspberry, strawberry, grapefruit, and/or peach.