Rosé lovers worldwide are breathing a huge le sigh of despair. After releasing an astonishingly subpar vintage report for the 2016 harvest, Aix-en-Provence mayor Jacques Sansvin has announced that France’s supply of precious pink juice is estimated to run dry before Rosé season even fully begins.
Despite desperate attempts to salvage their glorified grapes, bouts of frost, hail, and excessive rainfall throughout the 2016 growing season have left little to offer on the rosé-making front in regions all over the country. While frost plagued the vines of the Loire Valley, excessive rainfall directly before harvest caused grapes all over the southern portion of the country, including the regions of Provence, Rhone Valley, and Languedoc-Roussillon, to become heavily diluted, resulting in insufficient quality of grapes for prosperous Rosé production.
The minimally acceptable quantity of fruit was salvaged and fermented, with an underwhelming result. Normally, France produces an average of 840 million bottles of rosé annually, with 141 million of those bottles coming from Provence alone. The 2016 vintage clocks in astoundingly low, with just over 200 million bottles of rosé produced nationwide, though it doesn’t stop there. Naturally, producers’ first concern is supplying their home country with sufficient rosé, leaving even less of the summer water available to the foreign market; only an estimated s0 million bottles are set to ship to the USA.
Sadly, Yes Way, Pinot Grigio just doesn’t have the same ring to it. We can already hear the wails of Hamptons-goers, frat bros, and basic bitches everywhere. Looks like you’ll be drowning your summertime sadness in an ice cold bucket of Coronas instead.
As they say en francais, April Fool’s.