Don't Call It "Pink"

Contributed by Daniel Rogov, wine writer

If there is a single wine that has come to be firmly associated with women that wine is the one thought of by may people as "Pink Champagne". It is probable that this association started somewhere during the heyday of the flappers, those young women who considered themselves so bold and daring during the 1920's, when the rage at Charleston and Black Bottom dance parties became something called Pink Champagne. Nothing could have given Champagne a worse name, for the probability is that the terrible half-sweet half coarse stuff that the flappers and their equally bold and daring dates were drinking had nothing whatever to do with France. If it did, it certainly had nothing in common with the great wine we know as Champagne, and was probably nothing more than a rose d'Anjou or far worse, a California bootleg "Burgundy" (remember, Prohibition lasted in the United States from 1920 - 1933, so the sale of wine was illegal) to which bubbles had been added by pumping in ample amounts of carbon dioxide.

Responding to all of this, producers in the vicinity of Reims and Epernay began to realize that there might be money to be made in giving the world, men and women alike, a true Champagne that was actually pink. If the truth be told, the first rose Champagnes (call it pink Champagne in France and you will probably be deported within hours and without ceremony) were not very good, made largely by adding cheap Pinot Noir to standard Champagnes in order to give them their pink-orange color. Starting only in the 1960s did rose Champagne attain its legitimate place in the repertoire of winemakers, and today some of the very best Champagnes are brut roses.