Seventy Attempts At Pink
TASTING NOTES: “The land where the mountains embrace the Mediterranean, where France meets Italy and where the coastal and cosmopolitan cities of Nice, Cannes and Saint-Tropez give way to remote and rural villages, Provence is a rugged landscape of lavender fields, olive groves and wine – most notably its pale, fruity and refreshing rosés. Provence is so synonymous with rosé that it has largely defined the style of Pink wine made all around the world.
A joint project between the brothers Alex and Fred Chaudière of Château Pesquié and Eric Solomon, Le Paradou Côtes de Provence Rosé, is a blend of Cinsault, Grenache, and Vermentino from a vineyard located in the heart of Provence, in the shadow of Sainte-Victoire, the picturesque peak immortalized by Paul Cézanne in more than 70 paintings.”
VARIETALS: Cinsault, Grenache, Rolle. Vines 20-30 years-old. Clay limestone, sandy red clay soils. at 250 meters elevation. Sustainable farming.
BARRELS: Hand harvested, gentle, whole cluster pressing, fermented in stainless steel tanks 4 months in tank, vegan
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Sainte-Victoire, the mountain behind this wine.
Paul Cézanne painted Mont Sainte-Victoire more than 70 times. Seventy. That’s not artistic devotion, that’s a fixation that would get you a talking-to from a concerned friend today. But here’s what’s wild: he wasn’t trying to paint the same thing over and over. He was chasing something he believed was genuinely there in the mountain — some underlying geometric truth that the human eye kept slipping past. He famously wrote that he wanted to “treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone.” The mountain wasn’t a subject. It was a problem he couldn’t solve, and he kept showing up with a canvas to have another crack at it.
What he accidentally did, while failing to crack it to his own satisfaction, was invent modern art. Picasso and Braque looked at those late Cézanne canvases — the ones where the mountain starts breaking apart into facets and planes — and essentially said, “wait, what if you just kept going?” Cubism followed. Then pretty much everything else. One man, one mountain, seventy attempts at an answer he never quite reached, and the entire trajectory of 20th century visual art falls out of the back of it like change from a broken vending machine.
Cézanne died in 1906 after being caught in a rainstorm while painting outdoors near the mountain and refusing to stop working. He collapsed, was brought home by a passing laundry cart driver, went back out the next morning anyway, collapsed again, and died a week later. Seventy-one paintings of Sainte-Victoire, and he was still showing up. That’s either the most romantic thing in art history or a cautionary tale about sunscreen and common sense. Probably both.
