Rosé Colored Glasses

Women who drink rosé have always been, at least in my own judgmental interpretation, girls who played Slap-the-Bag with boxes of Franzia at frat parties and then grew up to become disgruntled adults who transfer the bag to a perspiring glass, and now sip in overpriced lawn chairs complaining about those same frat boys who became their husbands.

I’ve always grabbed for the red. Never been one for pairing. Cheese, jazz, Wednesdays. I don’t order too much fish and usually go for the hard stuff when it’s really hot outside. So I guess I’d always just spiraled around white wine as an option that existed without ever really engaging it – much like that one party guest you acknowledge with a nod upon entrance and who remains one room away as you circulate but isn’t really worth pursuing for a conversation.

The other day, I’m not really sure what made me go off track from my typical Malbec – perhaps because everything feels sort of in-between. I’m hot in the day and grab for a sweater at night. I’m finishing work and life here in Jerusalem and yet, definitely don’t feel like I’m going anywhere else yet. I grabbed the rosé off the shelf on a whim. It was in between everything I wanted and just made sense.

Later, I settled myself into the basin of the tub for a steamy bubble bath, two candles, and a book of short stories. I twisted my gold and black flecked wine glass in my hand and mused, “Well. That’s much more delicious than I remember. Did I just become a rosé girl? How did that happen?”

As I watched the rose gold swirl in my glass, I remembered the same color captured in a taut bag swinging back and forth after receiving a hefty slap. Someone standing under the spigot of the wine bag holding her mouth open like a baby bird, while an upperclassman poised the bag over her head. Franzia dribbled down her front in in the overflow. A sophomore in the kitchen was wearing the discarded wine box on his head, his attention solely focused on freeing his sneaker from the sticky floor.*

*Upon reviewing this with a few readers preceding my own generation, it became clear there some clarification was needed, so allow me a brief interlude: The bag of wine comes in a box. For Slap-the-Bag, the wine box is discarded as the bag holds the goods. The game “Slap-the-Bag” is literally just how it sounds: you slap the bag, then drink from the bag, then move on to do something else in the party like compare the literary stylings of Chaucer and Faulkner or the socio-economic implications of the latest Middle East peace accord.

So anyway, I was watching the sophomore with the box on his head try to escape from the grasp of the kitchen floor when my best friend came over and clinked his can of shitty beer to mine and we leaned on the damp counter to watch the mayhem. He and I had a similar pace – we’d dance a bit and then sidle over to a quiet corner to find someone interesting to argue with. He found Slap-the-Bag somewhat repugnant and I was secretly very grateful for that. It just always felt like an overworked and underappreciated udder and the whole thing seemed two beats away from a vile act of violence.

Ben and I were friends all four years of college. From the first day, in fact, when my roommate dragged me along to breakfast with him because her and his parents worked together at the State Department and told them they should connect on campus. Ben and my roommate murmured back and forth and I remember the conversation being very diplomatic and quite strained. It was clear from the outset that they were not meant to be friends, but because my roommate had toted me along to diffuse the awkwardness (and had actually sold me on the need for a first-day power breakfast of bottomless hashbrowns) I met the person who would most profoundly impact my college experience. It was my inner (and soon-to-be outer) fat kid that really brought us together. My roommate departed for the psych building and Ben and I discovered that we were headed for the same 101 international relations course to begin building the base layer of our eventual international studies majors. That was the catalyst for the next four years of classes, parties, picking tomatoes on the farm, teasing me about my romantic ineptitudes, holding his hand through his own explorations and heartache, locking ourselves into a library study room with overly sugared coffee to debate foreign policies of Reagan & Carter in strung-out cram sessions, getting to know and deeply admire his eventual wife and silently rooting for the endurance of their love story to emerge from debaucherous swamp of college, and taking walks to come down from our existential crises.

There were 3 primary motifs that tied Ben and me together in what I hope will be a forever friendship: our joint major, the frisbee team, and the farm. I look at our narratives since then and wonder how we are not on the cover of every liberal arts magazine in the country. I took the blended aspects of our major – religion, culture, history, politics, and planted flowers (both literal and metaphorical) along the trails I took to far off lands. I used the sport we played and our foreign policy classes as a career path – traveling to history’s epicenter trying to create change through positive, playful activism.

Ben stuck with agriculture. He became a wine vineyard manager and eventually a consultant in his own company. He did marry that girl who was always his other half and who travels for her public health work to the places where our fingertips only can stretch to on the map. They have a homestead. Inoculated mushrooms. He’s involved in land conservation politics in his local township. The last time I visited I got to meet their ducks; I have yet to meet their son. His wife has a blog that I envy greatly based on recipes from their backyard. They have a wine label they just created.

This is the label for their Noiret Méthode Ancestrale under the brand Quartzwood: https://www.quartzwoodfarm.com/wine. And the graphic designer is a local of Asheville! Sally Morgan of Ratbee Press & Design

As I sink into this bubble bath, I think for certain he could tell me more about this rosé – how it differs from the Franzia we used to drink from the bag in the houses with sticky floors. He could draw a line through the evolutions of our palates that brought us to where we are now and all of the reasons why there is pride and purpose in the paths we chose even if they seem slightly unconventional. He could explain how I became a rosé girl.

Growing up, I watched my mom pour a glass of wine and sit down for a chat with Hank - a staple figure in my mother’s life and a name I’ve heard throughout mine. He is her Ben. They were friends in college and carried one another through first marriages, divorces; each one knows the intimate details about the others’ children. There’s an ocean of memories, laughter, tears, shoulders of support, inside that glass of wine and she pours it as a toast to him – a ceremonial acknowledgement of past, present, and future when she picks up the phone to call her friend.

All of these reflections swirl in my speckled cup as I hold it just above the bubble line for a toast, both I and my wine glass sweating profusely in the steam-filled tub. To change of palate; to adapting to temperature shifts; to our threads of friendship that carry us through major transitions of our lives; to all that we’ve been and all that we aspire to become. To rosé. For now.