Winemaker Notes
Home-made salmon gravlax, Involtini with goat cheese and speck ham, Nordic prawn salad.
Blend: 40% Grenache, 40% Cinsault, 10% Rolle, 10% others
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
A super-pale, super-reductive wine, this sheds some of its smoky, flinty scents for dusty spice and plum-skin savor. While it’s austere in flavor, the rich texture suggests that this will become more expressive with more time in bottle.
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2018 Château des Bertrands Côtes de Provence is beautiful, tantalizing, and delicious. TASTING NOTES. This wine is fresh and bright. Its classic aromas and flavors of ripe strawberries and subtle earth should pair it nicely with light picnic fare. (Tasted: March 14, 2019, San Francisco, CA)
Whether it’s playful and fun or savory and serious, most rosé today is not your grandmother’s White Zinfandel, though that category remains strong. Pink wine has recently become quite trendy, and this time around it’s commonly quite dry. Since the pigment in red wines comes from keeping fermenting juice in contact with the grape skins for an extended period, it follows that a pink wine can be made using just a brief period of skin contact—usually just a couple of days. The resulting color depends on grape variety and winemaking style, ranging from pale salmon to deep magenta.
Cotes de Provence is an extensive but valuable appellation that includes vineyards bordering the main Provencal appellations. Its sites vary from subalpine hills, which receive the cooling effects of the mountains to the north, to the coastal St-Tropez, a region mainly influenced by the warm Mediterranean sunshine.
Here the focus is on quality rosé, as it defines four fifths of the region’s wines. Following in the rosé footsteps, a lot of new effort is going into the region’s red production as well. A new generation has turned its focus on high quality Grenache, Syrah, Cinsault and Carignan. Cotes de Provence white wines, which represent a miniscule part of the region as far as volume, are nonetheless worthy of consideration and can include any combination of Clairette, Semillon, Ugni Blanc and Vermentino.