Wine

By Leigh Pomeroy

Celebrating the lovely, dry rosés of southern France

Spring and summer are perfect for rosés — light, delicious, pretty, forgiving, lovely, unpretentious and… well… just plain sexy.

The great thing about rosés is that you don't have to plan to serve them. You just need a few in your fridge to pull out for any occasion — a friend dropping by, a lazy weekend afternoon, a beautiful sunset, an experiment with hors d'oeuvres, a light veggie or seafood meal.

Rosés go with a wide variety of foods: Japanese sushi and tempura, Greek dolmas and avgolemono (lemon soup), Mexican snapper, southern catfish and crawfish, and (of course) Minnesota walleye.

The key to enjoying rosé is to drink it young — that is, in the year after it's made or, at most, within two years. Less than a handful of rosés improve with age, most notably those from Cahors and Bandol in France, but both are difficult to find in the U.S. So the bottom line is: The younger the better.

Good wine shops, in fact, sell off their older rosés in the fall so they have room to put in fresh ones when spring arrives.

A lot of wine drinkers put up their noses when they think "rosé" because they have memories of the old sweet versions like Mateus and Lancers, the cheap jug stuff and the once ubiquitous White Zinfandels. But today's quality rosés are all dry.

The best ones for the money come from southern France, including the Rhône Valley, and bear area names like Côtes du Rhône, Ventoux, Côtes de Provence, Coteaux d’Aix-en-Provence, Costières de Nîmes and Languedoc. One of the most highly regarded appellations is Tavel, which by law only produces rosé. A good value rosé that comes from an area right next door is Lirac.

Other appellations that you might find on bottles are the IGPs (Indication Géographique Protégées) Pays d'Oc (encompassing the Languedoc and Roussillon) and Méditerranée (encompassing Provence and the island of Corsica). They may be blended from several sub-appellations, including those listed above, and are of similar quality.

The primary grape for nearly all these rosés is grenache, which imparts a slight mandarin and, to me, salty flavor. Other grapes include syrah, cinsault, mourvèdre, carignan, cabernet sauvignon and caladoc — a relatively new hybrid grape that is a cross between grenache and malbec. All of these are red grapes that add unique characteristics to the rosé, like berry, cherry, spice, herbs and minerality. And all are well-suited to the warm climate of the region, which means they retain their natural acidity in the hot summer sun.

More and more, some vintners are adding the white grape vermentino (also known as rolle) to the blend, which adds flavors such as pear, peach, grapefruit and even almond. Vermentino is also found in white blends from southern France, but the best pure Vermentinos come from the island of Sardinia off the west coast of Italy.

Aside from taste, perhaps the best attraction of southern French rosés is that they are inexpensive. Some good ones cost as little as $10. How can the French do this? Because there are oceans of grapes in southern France and many of the producers are large cooperatives owned by the growers themselves. Their facilities are state-of-the-art and produce very high quality wines. Another reason why the wines are fairly priced is that they don't need to be aged. They're made and released to the market in just a matter of months.

Is it worth spending the extra bucks for a rosé that's over $20? Unless it's from Bandol, the answer is usually "non!" Many of the higher-priced rosés are expensive because they're attached to some celebrity, such as Brad Pitt (Miraval), Jon Bon Jovi (Hampton Water), Kylie Minogue (Kylie), Sarah Jessica Parker (Invivo X) and John Legend (LVE). They're all made by large wineries, often co-ops, which produce many brands and labels of rosé. Unless you crave putting money into the pockets of people who are already rich, I would choose other less expensive offerings.

The Bordeaux area also produces dry, inexpensive rosés, but these are made from cabernet sauvignon, merlot and cabernet franc grapes. They tend to have more color than those from southern France, usually are fuller and less tart, and often display the slightly green olive/herbal characteristic derived from these grapes.

Other great rosés come from the Loire region north of Bordeaux. But to delve into these requires a whole separate article.

So go out and look for French rosés, preferably at your local wine shop. But if you can't find what you want there, wine retailers on the web offer a plentiful selection.

LIT DU NORD: MINNESOTA BOOKS AND AUTHORS

By Nick Healy

A Story Rooted Here

Photo by Sarah Whiting

At its heart, Diane Wilson’s debut novel, “The Seed Keeper,” is a story about one woman and her struggle against a sense of rootlessness, but the sweep of the story addresses more than a century and a half of history in southern Minnesota while distilling it into the experiences of a single Dakota family.

The book begins as Rosalie Iron Wing, in her early 40s and recently widowed, leaves behind the farm where she has resided for more than 20 years. She sets off along icy roads in the Minnesota River valley and makes her way to the place where she lived as a child, until her father’s early death severed her from her family’s past. She feels she has come home, and in that dusty and forgotten cabin, with no heat, electricity or indoor plumbing, she intends to start over.

“She’s lost her husband. She’s lost her father. She has no connection to family,” Wilson said. “In a way, the assimilation process that I write about in the book from 1862 on forward is culminated in Rosalie’s life. She is about at the furthest edge that all of these assimilation policies and programs have carried her family to, where she believes she is the only remaining person in the Iron Wing family.”

The story moves backward and forward in time and engages with key forces that have shaped the region and its people — from the incursion of white settlers into Dakota land in the 1800s and the U.S.-Dakota War in 1862 to the farm crisis of the 1980s and the subsequent era of corporate farming. Told through the firstperson voices of four Dakota women, “The Seed Keeper” deals with the past on a personal scale, and as always with the best sort of historical fiction, it never feels like a history lesson.

Most of the story tracks Rosalie’s life, although some scenes take place long before her birth, and in Rosalie, Wilson has created the sort of character readers will be thinking about long after they’ve finished the book. She is complicated, guarded and imperfect, but she is also persistent, strong and always interesting.

As a teenager in the late 1970s, Rosalie lives in a foster home in Mankato and hopes to save enough money to afford a place of her own as soon as she reaches her 18th birthday. She gets a job detasseling corn and ends up meeting the person she will eventually marry.

At first, it is a marriage of necessity, not of love, and Rosalie finds herself feeling isolated among a rural community of white farm families. Through a friendship with a neighbor, Rosalie learns how to plant and care for a large garden, connecting her to the earth and, in ways she doesn’t realize, to her family’s legacy.

Rosalie and her husband also struggle to navigate the challenges of being family farmers in the 1980s. They face the hardship of drought years and the arrival of an agribusiness giant that drives a wedge between neighbors and contributes to broader changes that forever alter the way of life in rural Minnesota.

After her husband’s death and her return to her childhood home, Rosalie makes her way back to a community from which she’d long been cut off and, eventually, discovers she has been living for years within a short drive of a great aunt she didn’t know about. Rosalie finds Darlene Kills Deer living in a small apartment crowded with “buckets and cans packed with precious soil,” an improbable indoor garden Darlene has maintained for one reason.

“All those seeds in my closet, all that’s left of my family, they had to be planted or they’d die, just like us,” she explains.

Wilson said writing her first novel was “hugely daunting on many fronts.” But since its release in March, “The Seed Keeper” has enjoyed critical acclaim, including starred reviews in Booklist and Publishers Weekly and a plug in The New Yorker.

Wilson is the author of two previous books, including a 2006 memoir, “Spirit Car: Journey to a Dakota Past,” which won a Minnesota Book Award. A Mdewakanton descendent, she lives in Shafer (near Taylors Falls) and works as executive director of the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, a national organization devoted to creating sovereign food systems for Native people.

Having worked on “The Seed Keeper” for a decade, Wilson said, “I was hoping it would read as a book about characters and questions. It wasn’t intended to lecture about one side or another but more to raise the questions about decisions that we’ve made as human beings and what the consequences are of those decisions both for ourselves and for the seeds and the world around us.”