Hamptons Rosé Master Wolffer Will Make Pink Wine From Provence, Too

(Bloomberg) -- It was a big deal in 1992 when German-born international entrepreneur Christian Wolffer gambled on making dry, elegant, Provence-style rosé from his vineyard in a Hamptons potato field. Back then, the pink vino grabbing American attention was sweet white zinfandel.

But as rosé became the drink that defines summer, his bold move turned out to be more than prescient. By 2020, the Wolffer Estate winery was selling eight different pink cuvées, including sparkling, no-alcohol, and even rosé cider.

You might think that's enough for any one winery. You would be wrong.

This week the Long Island winery is rolling out 400,000 bottles of yet another version. This latest stop on Wolffer's 30-year rosé journey is a new pink wine it's actually making in Provence, the original style inspiration for all the others.

As winemaker and partner Roman Roth joked in a zoom interview from the Long Island winery cellar, “Everything we touch turns to rosé!” (Well, yes, but they also make excellent reds and whites).

How good is the new pink wine? The quick answer is that it's deliciously sophisticated and adds a new dimension to the winery's pink offerings. Meaning: Yes, you should try it. But why did they go to Provence? That's more a complicated question.

The Wolffer rosé story began, as many ideas do, at a lavish end-of-summer party in the Hamptons. Wolffer himself, then a fledgling vintner, watched celebs and his European friends knock back bottles of French dry pink wine and had an aha moment. He saw parallels between summer in the Hamptons and the dolce vita sun-and-water lifestyle in Provence's St-Tropez. “We should be making rosé!” he told Roth, his newly hired winemaker, also born in Germany.

From the first vintage, the winery's light, crisp rosé with a core of bright fruit had European sensibility and flair. Roth thinks it became a Hamptons hit because wine drinkers who served great (read: expensive) French reds and whites could endorse this frivolous local vino without losing face as serious oenophiles.

Some wineries make pink wine as a byproduct, bleeding off juice for reds before it picks up too much color from the grape skins. The best, though, are intended as rosé from the start. Roth picks grapes for the Wolffer examples early in the harvest season to keep vibrant acidity and balance, and he creates blends of both red and white grapes—sometimes as many as eight—to create wines with more harmony and layers of complexity and a savory, round texture.

As sales of the estate rosé began to go vertical, Wolffer released a sparkling version, Noblesse Oblige, in 2007, then a barrel-aged, cranberry-scented luxury cuvée, Grandioso, in 2009.

Still, the winery didn't make a profit until 2012. At the end of that year, Christian Wolffer died in a swimming accident, and two of his four children, Joey (Zooming with me from Long Island for this article) and Marc (Zooming from Berlin), took over. They agreed that this could no longer be a hobby; they had to make it pay.

Joey's experience in fashion and clothing boutiques and Marc's extensive resume in international hospitality and his European base turned out to be a good match. Joey's husband stepped in to become general manager. The trio and Roth often came up with ideas for expansion over dinner.

“We're a family company,” Joey explained. “We can try things out, take risks, create trends. We're not boardroom people.”

They pulled in younger customers with their rosé cider, which now sells about 100,000 cases a year.

A friend's comment that Wolffer's rosé was “summer in a bottle” spurred a brand-new merlot-dominant cuvée launched in 2014, the year of the Hamptons rosé panic, when stores ran out of it in August. Labeled Summer in a Bottle, it comes in a gorgeous flower-decorated bottle that looks as if it were designed for an Instagram tabletop photo. The first 2,000 cases were gone in a week. Now, the estate makes much more.

Still, Marc says, “We saw the limits of growth potential on Long Island.” Although Wolffer also buys grapes from other sustainably farmed vineyards, the Long Island wine region is small, with not much more than 2,000 acres of vines.

Christian Wolffer had always wanted to make wine in Argentina, and Marc owns 200 acres of vines in Mendoza. In 2015, for their first international venture, they partnered with renowned winemaker Susana Balbo's Dominio del Plata winery there to create malbec-based Finca Wolffer Rosé in their own crisp, light, pale-colored style.

Where else to go? They considered Oregon, but Marc, who lives in Europe and frequently visits the south of France, had the idea of heading to rosé's heartland, Provence, for a second Summer in a Bottle cuvée. “Financially, it was better to work with a partner there than buying land,” he explains. They found one in 11th-generation winemaker Guillaume de Chevron Villette, owner of 550 hectares and nine estates in Provence, where they could grow, produce, make, and bottle the wine in one place.

Making rosé at de Chevron Villette's Château Reillanne, 30 minutes north of St-Tropez, wasn't a slam-dunk. Covid-19 problems and climate changes in weather posed challenges. The plan to release a 2020 vintage had to be scrapped. In 2021, spring frosts destroyed some of the crop. In August 2021, vineyard workers battled wildfires to save the winery and vineyards; one person died and 50 hectares of vines were lost. Luckily, Roth, Joey, and Marc were able to finalize the 2021 blend in the travel window between the delta and omicron variant surges.

Summer in a Bottle Cotes de Provence 2021 is more polished and less overtly fruity than the Long Island version at the same price, $26. Super pale and fragrant, with citrus and floral notes, the grenache-based blend, with cinsault, syrah, and vermentino (a white), has the kind of delicate mineral flavors you find in better Provence examples. Although I love the Grandioso with food, the new Provence cuvée is my favorite Wolffer rosé—at least so far. And the eye-catching bottle is decorated with a different mix of colorful flowers and butterflies.

The team is thinking big. “What we've created with Summer in a Bottle is unique,” says Joey Wolffer. “We could take it to Asia. We're really selling a lifestyle.”