2018 Lorenza Rosé California 750 ml

Spring is here in Napa Valley and that means one thing: rosé releases are in full swing, and Lorenza’s ballet slipper-pink release far over-delivers with its lifted aromas of lemon blossoms and roses and mouth-watering flavors of summertime fruit—strawberries, white peaches—embodies everything we love about rosé, no matter when we drink it.

Lorenza’s previous release, the 2017, was one of the Wall Street Journal’s top picks of the year, and this one more than lives up to the great expectations set by that remarkable bottling. Indeed, the 2018 growing season seems to have been custom designed for the production of a seriously delicious rosé like this one: Moderate temperatures allowed the old vine Grenache, Carignan, Mourvedre, and Cinsault to produce healthy, concentrated berries. They were harvested at or before sunrise (the better to maintain their lively acidity), carefully sorted, and whole-cluster pressed. Everything, in other words, was done to maintain a straight line between the vineyards and the bottle, losing none of the character of its incredible mosaic of terroirs along the way.

This laser-like attention to detail has always been the guiding light for mother-daughter team behind Lorenza, Melinda Kearney and Michèle Ouellet. Their first release was in 2008, but their history goes back nearly two decades before that, when Melinda first fell in love with the dry rosés of Provence in 1990. Her daughter Michèle first encountered rosé as a teenager, when she was a model in Paris and enjoying rosé alongside meals. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that when Melinda and Michèle decided to start their own label, dry, Provence-style rosé was the focus.

They quickly learned that every little detail matters in rosé production, from vineyard sourcing to picking times and beyond. They’ve stuck with their goals now for nearly a dozen vintages, harvesting at relatively low levels of sugar in order to maintain the crisp energy that their rosé has become famous for, and completing both fermentation and aging in stainless steel so that nothing obscures the character of the fruit itself. The result of all that work, all those years of focus on crafting a truly great California rosé, is a wine that will pair with a massive range of food at the table, put a smile on your face as soon as it’s in the glass, and bring to mind the warm days of summer.