on the color of roses and what remains
There is a particular shade of pink that belongs to no one. It appears in the glass the way light appears after a long afternoon - not suddenly, but as if it had always been there, waiting for someone to notice.
Miraval Rosé is that kind of wine. Born in Provence, in the Côtes de Provence appellation, where the soil carries limestone and memory in equal measure. Four grapes build its architecture - Cinsault, Grenache, Syrah, and Rolle. Each one a different sentence in the same quiet paragraph.
Wisława Szymborska once wrote about the number pi - that it doesn't stop, that it keeps going past all attempts to contain it. A wine like this has something of that quality. You try to describe it and the description keeps extending. Mineral. Dry. Faintly fruited. Faintly something else.
In Poland we have our own pink wines now, small and earnest, grown in places that were not supposed to grow wine at all. The Bieszczady mountains in late August hold a kind of silence that makes you want to open something precise and cool. Miraval would not be wrong there. Nothing too loud. Nothing performing.
At thirteen percent alcohol it asks very little of you. It is not trying to impress. This is either its greatest virtue or its most elegant deception.
Served cold - genuinely cold, not politely cold - it becomes a different conversation. The minerality sharpens. The fruit recedes to suggestion. You are left with something that resembles clarity.
It goes well with fish. With seafood. With soft cheese and the kind of salad that arrives without explanation. It goes well with a book you are reading slowly because you do not want it to end.
Hesse wrote about rivers - that they do not hurry, that they are already where they are going. Provençal rosé has something of that patience. It is not in a rush to be understood.
The Miraval estate sits in Le Val, in the Var department, surrounded by forest and what geographers call garrigue - the dry, herbal scrubland that gives Provençal wines their particular vocabulary. You can almost taste the lavender not being there. The restraint is part of the flavor.
I think about the Polish word 'spokój' - calm, but more than calm. A settledness. A wine that achieves spokój is a wine that knows what it is and does not apologize for it.
Miraval Rosé knows what it is.
Pour it into a clear glass. Watch the color. It is not quite salmon and not quite blush - it is the hour before the hour has a name. Drink it while something is still possible. Drink it while the light is still deciding what to do.
The rest - the legal proceedings, the ownership questions, the complexity of human arrangements - belongs to other documents. This is just a wine. This is just Provence. This is just the particular shade of pink that belongs to no one and therefore to everyone who reaches for it.
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