I like to try new things. Not quite as much as I like the intellectual superiority I feel when I tell people that I like to try new things, but it is rather close. To that end, I’ve always like the idea of rosé – obviously, it should be something with the complex profile of a good red with the brightness of a good white. Not surprisingly, this seems to be difficult to pull off.

Feeling up for a bit of a challenge, then, I looked for a quality rosé at my local grocery (in this case, I chose to define “quality” as “something in the $10 range.”) This poses quite the challenge. The vast majority of rosé wines (or, at least, the vast majority of widely available rosé wines) seem to be quite cheap. Questionably so, really – I might be a cynic, but I just don’t think I’m going to get much from a $3.67 bottle. I was able to find Nellie’s Garden, though, for under $9 (a good deal cheaper than the $14.99 that the winery seems to think their product is worth, it could be noted). Purchases made, it was time to get down to business.

My initial smell, honestly, was rather frightening. Almost totally devoid of flavor, it didn’t exactly make me confident about my adventurous purchase. My initial taste was, if anything, worse: instead of the brightness of a white with the interesting profile of a red, I was treated to the brightness of lobster juice and the flavor profile of paint thinner.

Really. It was that bad.

Since I had already purchased the bottle, though, I pressed on, and was pleasantly surprised. About halfway through the first glass, things turned around completely: the flavor was certainly interesting (I’ve heard the term “jammy” used to describe wine quite often, but I have never tasted a wine that embodied it quite as much as this – strawberry was a particularly dominant flavor).

For whatever reason, I am not very fond of describing flavors as “changing in the glass” – it’s always seemed a bit poncy to me, I suppose – but in this case, it is a reasonable description. The initial taste might have been a scare, but the final result was something that was really quite good. Good enough, honestly, to think about purchasing it again.

Score: 87