In April, Jirka Jireh curated our wines with an eye toward seasonality (fresh, light reds for spring!) and also education. Jirka’s spent 15 years in the hospitality industry, first in New York and now in California, where she pours and sells wines at Ordinaire, a shop and bar in Oakland. She also runs an education initiative called Industry Sessions, a virtual resource that offers wine education to BIPOC wine industry professionals in the U.S. and Canada.  

That focus on both education and inclusivity came through in our April box. The wines encompassed a vast rainbow of wine colors, with various shades of pink, and Jirka walked us through what these hues can teach us about the wines themselves. A wine made from red grapes doesn’t always yield the deep, dark garnet hue we might expect; in fact, you may encounter a red so light it makes you wonder what category — red or rosé — it falls into.  

 Here are the wines we explored in April: 

• Populis Rosé — This bright, zippy rosé is an unexpected blend of both red and white grapes, with carignan, zinfandel, and pinot noir meeting with muscat and French colombard, both processed with skin contact, to produce a most versatile wine. While you may pick up fruit notes, like ripe strawberry, there’s also some chalky ocean spray on the palate.  
• Wild Arc Red Piquette — Piquette is its own category, made by adding water to grape pomace (the leftover skins, seeds, and stems) and fermenting what remains of the sugars. If you’ve had a piquette before, there’s a good chance it was from Wild Arc, which has popularized the style. This one, made with a hybrid grape called marquette, comes in at a low 7% ABV and is juicy, eccentric, and a little sour with notes of cranberry and earthy bibb lettuce. Drink it ice-cold on a hot summer day.
• Emme Carignan ‘Mary Jane Madeline’ — This is a lighter, more glou glou-style wine than you'd expect from carignan. But due to nearby wildfires in Mendocino, California, Emme winemaker Rosalind Reynolds picked these grapes a little early and split the batch in half, processing one batch with carbonic fermentation and the other as a direct press rosé. The result is a light wine with bright acidity and tons of fruit notes, including strawberries and candied grapes.
• Onda Brava ‘Rosado de Uva País’ — This Chilean wine is made with thin-skinned país grapes, grown on 200-year old ungrafted and unirrigated vines in granitic soils. As such, this is an unconventional rosé, more savory-leaning than most, with notes of blood orange and red currant dashed with sea salt and fresh ground black pepper.

Want more of these delicious pink wines? We have a select number of bottles for sale for you to stock up for the summer months ahead.