A new colour of wine?

At our annual wine fair last week at the Maritime Museum in Falmouth, I started the evening looking after the Alexander Krossa table as there had been a delay in the arrival of the 'Languedoc Ladies'!

Alexander Krossa is our agent in the Languedoc and the delightful Fabienne Capello our day to day contact. She was accompanied by Irène Tolleret, the enigmatic winemaker at the tiny boutique winery of Mas d'Auxières. Irène caused the upset by having her travel arrangements thrown into disarray by her colleagues in the Pic St Loup area, where she is instrumental in setting up a new AC for this unique growing area. Poor Fabienne, having just experienced a grand tour of the Eden Project, including a hike up to the rainforest look-out, then had to dash back to Exeter Airport to collect Irène who had come from Montpelier via Paris.

As I was handing over the stewardship of their table, one of our customers said to Irène, as she was exhorting him to try the lovely 'Rires et Sourires' Syrah / Grenache rosé, that he did not drink pink wine in November! I was amazed and highly amused by her immediate response which marked her out as the ex-marketing person she really is! She came straight back and said, “but in November this is not a rosé wine, look at it now, it is a magenta wine”! And so a new word entered the wine vocabulary that evening and it was used extensively to punt this lovely wine!

So when you are considering what to drink with your fresh Cornish scallops in crème frâiche and ginger (I will let you have a recipe if you ask!) then look no further than the delightful Rires et Sourires Magenta from Mas d'Auxières.