Thirty-five years of rosé. What we have learned.

In 1989, rosé was not fashionable. In the south of France, most of it was sold in bulk, poured into unlabelled bottles, and drunk quickly without much thought. It was not a wine people talked about or sought out. It was just there, on the table, cold and convenient.

The Faulkner family bought Le Grand Cros that year and did something that most of their neighbours thought was unnecessary. They bottled their rosé, designed a label, and entered it into competition. They won four gold medals in their first year, which surprised everyone, including them.

The early years were not easy.

There was no template for what they were doing. Provençal rosé as a serious category simply did not exist in the way it does today. There were no lifestyle campaigns, no famous names lending their image to a pale pink bottle, no summers defined by the colour of what was in your glass. There was just a family, a vineyard, and a quiet belief that what they were making was worth taking seriously.

According to Vins de Provence, the region now produces over 160 million bottles a year and is considered the world's leading rosé appellation. In 1989, that world was a long way off. The Faulkners were building something without knowing quite what it would become, which in hindsight is probably why they built it properly.

Rosé grew up. We were already here.

By the time rosé became the defining drink of the global summer terrace, Le Grand Cros had been making it for over two decades. The attention was welcome, but it brought noise with it. Suddenly everyone had a rosé. Celebrities, fashion houses, hotel groups, each one packaged beautifully, marketed loudly, and in many cases made quickly and without much care for what was actually in the bottle.

What those years taught us is that attention is not the same as quality, and that a wine made for the moment rarely survives beyond it. Our rosé was never designed for a moment. It was designed for the table, to sit alongside food, to hold up to a second glass, to reward the kind of attention that most pink wine never receives. Jancis Robinson, one of the most respected voices in wine, has written about this shift in how serious drinkers now think about Provençal rosé, and it is a shift we have been quietly waiting for since the beginning.

What thirty-five years actually teaches you.

It teaches you patience before anything else. The vines in our oldest plots have been in the same ground for decades and they do not respond well to being hurried. They give what they give, in the time they choose, and the best thing a winemaker can do is stay out of the way and pay attention. It teaches you consistency too, not the rigid kind that ignores what a particular year is telling you, but the kind that means you know your own standard and you do not drop below it regardless of what the harvest brings.

It teaches you restraint in the cellar. Julian Faulkner studied at one of the most respected winemaking schools in France, the ENITA in Bordeaux, and what he took from that training was not a set of techniques to apply but a deep understanding of when not to intervene. The Institut Français de la Vigne et du Vin describes this as non-interventionist winemaking, and it is an approach that the best producers across the south of France have been quietly practising for years.

Most of all, thirty-five years teaches you that wine is about people. The finest bottles we have ever made found their best version of themselves around a table, with good food and good company and no particular agenda for the evening. That has not changed since 1989 and we do not expect it to change anytime soon.

Le Grand Cros has been making wine in Provence since 1989. The estate produces rosé, red, white, and sparkling wines from 24 hectares of vines in the heart of the Var. To visit the estate or arrange a tasting, get in touch.