“I hate the word ‘trend,’” said Joey Wölffer, owner of the Hamptons-based Wölffer Estate winery, known for its rosé. It’s a surprising statement from someone who makes one of the most ubiquitous drinks in the Hamptons and beyond. But Mrs. Wölffer has been at it for a while.
When the Wölffer Estate started making rosé in the early 1990s, many wine snobs in this country still associated the rosé variety with cheap, sweet offerings like “blush” zinfandel white wines, Wölffer said, seeing them as not much fancier than a cheap wine cooler.
“Nobody drank it,” said Wölffer, 40, on a recent Monday afternoon as he enjoyed a chicken curry lunch on the patio of the estate’s tasting room in Sagaponack, New York, looking out over rows of budding grape vines that stretched generously to the horizon. “Young people didn’t drink it. Young people did not drink wine.
They are now. The Wölffer Estate has ridden the rosé revival for the last 15 years and helped kickstart it too. In 2014, according to the company, Wölffer sold 1,530 cases of its signature line, “Summer in a Bottle,” a fresh rosé in a clear bottle decorated with a whimsical explosion of wildflowers and butterflies.
Last year the winery sold 69,000 cases of “Summer in a Bottle”, and this year it is on track to sell 73,000 cases, along with 35,000 cases of a new rosé imported from France, “Summer in a Bottle Côtes de Provence”.
Wölffer’s rosés (the company now has eight varieties) have become a fixture at backyard parties and beach picnics, a symbol of languid days on Long Island’s South Fork. . For young people sharing the summer, rosé has become a stylish alternative to beer or carbonated water.
The winery has also become a stage for its luxury SUV-owning patrons and the many visitors who flock to the beach throughout the summer. On weekend nights, groups of flawless couples and incognito celebrities turn out in pastel shorts and floral-print sundresses to lounge on the lawn behind the Wölffer Wine Stand on the south side of the property, sipping pink while your children have fun with live music. . In 2017, Alec and Hilaria Baldwin renewed their wedding vows on the Wolffer grounds.
“Rosé,” said Wölffer, “has become a lifestyle.”
Hobby wine at vineyard estate
A fashion executive, Ms. Wölffer runs her own fashion label, Joey Wölffer Reworked, with a boutique in Sag Harbor, the city where she lives with her husband, Max Rohn (CEO of Wölffer), and their two daughters, from 6 years. and 4. (Mrs. Wölffer owns and operates the Wölffer Estate with her half-brother, Marc Wölffer, who grew up in Germany and still lives in Europe).
His father, Christian Wölffer, who died in 2009, was a German-born venture capitalist who made his fortune in real estate. Her mother, Naomi Marks Wölffer, was a jewelry designer for Harry Winston and heiress to the Marks & Spencer retail fortune.
Joey, a competitive jumper, has three horses, two Dutch Warmbloods and a Selle Francais, at a 100-acre equestrian center on the 175-acre Wölffer grounds. She and her family are frequently featured in the event pages of Dan’s Papers, the social bible of the Hamptons, for its celebrity-studded benefit dinners.
Mrs. Wölffer knows that her life seems to be a spread of Town & Country come to life. “There is an element of luck to being born into this world, I am fully aware,” she said.
That doesn’t mean she’s always comfortable. “I’m a personality that has super high ups and super low downs,” she said. Maximalist and multitasker by nature, she speaks in a torrent of words and finds the idea of relaxing, even in a beach chair, magazine in hand, alien.
Meditation makes her anxious, she said. She prefers boxing. That day, she was a vision of patterns in a multicolored blouse of her own design, patched with block-print Indian fabric and other recycled fabrics. Both wrists were a tangle of bracelets. At nearly six feet tall, in suede ankle boots with three-inch stacked heels, she was pushing her height into WNBA power forward territory.
“I am at my best,” said Ms. Wölffer, “when I exceed my limit.”
Part of his drive comes from his father, who had the vision for the winery and conjured it up from a soggy potato field, planting his first vines in 1988, after moving the family from the Upper East Side.
“My father was a presence on the rise,” Ms. Wölffer said. “He really ran a room and he had a lot of power over people. But growing up with that as a child was a challenge. It was very difficult, very hard. I think it goes back to his childhood.”
Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1938, Christian Wölffer’s middle-class family lived in poverty during the war. “He always said, ‘You have no idea what real wrestling is,’” Ms. Wölffer recalled. “But I was a very insecure child.”
A life in the family business was the last thing he expected. “I wanted to get as far away as possible,” she said.
After graduating from Vanderbilt University in 2004 with a degree in human and organizational development, Ms. Wölffer headed to London, where she landed a job as a designer for Meems Ltd., a jewelry company that was sold in chains like Topshop. . Two years later, Ms. Wölffer returned to Manhattan and was working as a trend director for the Jones Group, a casual wear and accessories company, when her father was killed in a swimming accident while on vacation in Brazil.
At first, he had no interest in a career in wine. “I didn’t want to live my dad’s dream,” she said. “I wanted to live mine.”
Ultimately, however, the family legacy proved too strong. In 2013, she and Marc Wölffer took over the Wölffer Estate. They had one major asset: Roman Roth, Wölffer’s German-born winemaker, who had been there from the beginning and had earned more than 90 Wine Spectator scores for his high-end chardonnays and merlots.
But they faced significant obstacles. For starters, Marc Wölffer was 16 years older and had grown up in Europe, so the half-siblings barely knew each other. Mrs. Wölffer knew little about wine. Besides, her father had treated the winery like a hobby, not caring that it had been running in the red for years. However, Mrs. Wölffer and her brother were approaching this as a career. They needed to make a profit.
A pink hotbed miles from Manhattan
From the beginning, Christian Wölffer and Mr. Roth were committed to making rosé, believing that the East End terroir was perfect for producing an “elegant, fun and versatile rosé that would be perfect for cocktails in the East,” said Mr. Roth.
Both sought to produce a fresh, dry rosé like those they knew from their travels to the Provence region of southern France, where rosé is an intrinsic part of the St. Tropez lifestyle: a vin de soif (“wine for quench your thirst”) to be drunk in the afternoon, or as a festive appetizer with a salade niçoise or a salty bouillabaisse.
In the United States, however, many wine aficionados had associated rosé with fruity mass-market Portuguese offerings like Mateus and Lancers, which stood out in the flared-pants era, or the “white zins” of the 1990s. 1980 yuppie.
That began to change in the mid-2000s, when discerning consumers began discovering the drier, crisper rosés from Provence, with Château d’Esclans’ best-selling Whispering Angel leading the way. The era of so-called millennial champagne was born.
The Wölfers saw an opportunity to rebrand the Hamptons, a minor player in Long Island wine country, compared to the North Fork, as a pink hotbed. That meant changing the names of the wines, framing the rosé as, essentially, a glass of liquid sunshine.
With Ms. Wölffer as brand director, Wölffer launched a rosé cider, a festive alternative to strong mineral water for the summer crowd in the East End. In 2013, Wölffer followed up with “Summer in a Bottle,” with her Instagram design and name distilling the spirit of rosé into four words.
The concept took off, but success brought new competition. In 2018, Jon Bon Jovi and his son Jesse Bongiovi launched their own French rosé called Hampton Water.
So far, though, not much has slowed down Wölffer’s momentum. His eight rosés now account for 70 percent of his revenue, the company said.
“Seventy thousand cases is just an extraordinary amount of wine for a small estate,” said Kristen Bieler, senior editor at Wine Spectator, which oversees coverage of the rosé market. She credited Wölffer as “an early pioneer, committed to dry rosé production in the mid-’90s, long before it was all the rage.”
“Their rosés,” he added, “have become summer staples, synonymous with the Hamptons luxury lifestyle for wine drinkers far beyond the borders of these elite villages.”
Source: www.nytimes.com