Earlier this month my housemate Maggie’s cousin got married. The spoils Maggie brought back to the domicile included: a pink drink koozie decorated with phallic imagery (from the bachelorette party) and seven bottles of a rose wine (left over from the reception).
The wine is Johnson Estate Winery’s Chautauqua Blush. Johnson Estate — founded in 1961 and located in Westfield, N.Y. — claims to be the state’s oldest estate winery (i.e. a winery that has its own vineyards). The Chautauqua Blush is listed on its website at $8.99 .
Two of the original seven bottles were left, and while my wine preferences tend to be red and my color preferences tend not to be pink (Frankie, another housemate, and I had an odd speculative conversation recently about what it would take to murder the color), I opened the penultimate bottle.
On the label, the Johnson Estate folks suggest that the Chautauqua Blush “is very enjoyable at any temperature from lightly chilled to over ice,” so I stuck the bottle in the fridge and took it out after five minutes, due to impatience.
(For the record, no pretentious swirling and sniffing occurred in the process of tasting this wine).
If I had to select an overwhelming taste, I’d say cotton candy. Given that cotton candy is spun sugar, and J.E.’s C.B. contains 3.5 percent residual sugar, this would seem to follow.
“It’s sweet, and that’s how I roll,” Maggie said. “The more like juice it is, the better.”
The esteemed novelist and wine writer Jay McInerney has written in defense of pink wines , claiming that despite a traditionally bad rap, roses are on their way to becoming fashionable, but I’m not certain he’d cite C.B. in his argument.
I finished my glass (by glass, I mean plastic cup) — not unpalatable by any means, but it’s a wine for people who don’t like wine (or, in the case of Maggie’s newly wed cousin, a wine for people who are getting a pretty generous discount on it).
