Dr Vino’s wine blog

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Pink is the new black. Or actually the new white as far as champagne is concerned. Be gone thoughts of Liberace or heart-shaped tubs! Pink champagne is set to the be the darling of the holiday season this year as some brands have boosted sales by 80% in the past two years.

At last week’s Wine Media Guild lunch in New York I tasted the above bottles along with several others for a total of fifteen pink champagnes. Ed McCarthy, WMG member and author of Champagne for Dummies, led us in the tasting and suggested three brackets for these wines: slumming, wedding, and hip-hop or bling-bling. Oops wait, I guess those were my brackets not Ed’s. I think his were more like: $40 - $65; $60 - $80 (”theoretically more serious and can be aged”); and extremely expensive, not yet ready to drink.

While it was undoubtedly a tough call, I managed to come up with my faves in each category. They were:

NV Besserat de Bellefon Brut Rose ($40; Find this wine) The main appeal here is the wine is dry. The acidity really made me think about pairing with food. (Honorable mention here is the NV Piper-Heidsieck Brut Sauvage Rose ($42; find this wine), which has a super pink label to accompany the super pink bubbly. Ed said he’d serve this with large gatherings; I’d agree that it would please a group more than the Bellefon, whose acidity could be offputting to those who expect pink = sweet.)

1998 Pol Roger Brut Rose ($72; find this wine). As Winston Churchill would have I opted for this salmon-colored Pol Roger rose with a fine bead and crisp liveliness. Ed said that this was a better vintage than the 1999 but I lacked that comparative knowledge.

When we get to the bling-bling level, the prices are ridiculous and the tastes are sublime. My runner up was the 1995 Veuve Clicquot “La Grande Dame” Brut Rose ($230; find this wine, which Ed said is usually a full bodied style but I found this one very subtle and delicious.

But the ultimate in hedonistic indulgence was the NV (yes, non-vintage!) Krug Brut Rose ($293; find this wine). Even though Ed said that it was “too young to fully appreciate” the wine was pure elegance, very dry and very delicate. Given the stratospheric pricing on this one, I’ll bet that Krug rosé becomes the new “Cris” (aka Roederer Cristal). Find it in a nightclub near you.