All of us have tasted wines which seemed memorable and peerless under certain circumstances and conditions. There used to be one made by a family named Caruso in Ravello, near Amalfi; at least a dozen people who had drunk it on the terrace of the Hotel Caruso, which commands one of the great views of the world, have assured me that it is better than Chambertin and Chateau Margaux. It is a sound little wine and travels, but in New York, without the view, it has lost its glory.
Tavel is an exception, for it tastes as good in Chicago or San Francisco as in Avignon, and wherever you find it, it is, if genuine and not too old, about the best vin rose in the world. The Tavel district is, to my knowledge, the only important vineyard district which makes nothing but rose, where the whole knowledge and skill and effort of a town go into the making of a wine which is pink, not red or white.
The officially delimited area is a little triangle about two miles by five; the basic grape (which also yields the best rose of California) is the Grenache, but small percentages of Cinsaut, Clairette, Picpoul, Colitor, Bourboulenc, and Carignan are permitted.
Like all roses worthy of the name, Tavel owes its color, which is not far from that of a ripe strawberry, to a special method of vinification. It is emphatically not a blend of white wine and red (no pink wine so made has ever) been worth drinking), and if I may be technical for a moment, I can explain quite simply how it is made.
With a few exceptions, the juice and pulp of all grapes are white, and the color of red grapes is quite literally skin-deep; all of the good red wines owe their color to this pigment in the skin, which is soluble in alcohol but not in grape juice. It is altogether possible, therefore, to make white wine from red grapes, if they are pressed as soon as they are picked, or before fermentation has set in; all red wines are made from grapes pressed immediately after picking; all red wines are made from red grapes crushed and fermented in their skins. As alcohol is produced during fermentation, the new wine takes on color from the skins, and left to its own devices, becomes red wine. If however, you take the new wine off the skins when it is the color of strawberries, it will be the color of strawberries all its life. If it is made from the proper grapes in one barren little Provencal valley, it will be Tavel.
The virtues and charms of Tavel are many; it can be drunk young (preferably before it is three years old), it should be served chilled (no inconsiderable advantage in Provence), it goes with any dish, from fried bouillabaisse to escargots and from fried fish to steak; it is a pretty wine (a half-dozen glasses of Tavel against a linen tablecloth look like so many flowers); it is an unpretentious wine (you can take it with you on a picnic and cool it in a brook).
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