It’s no secret that sommeliers have been ditching heavily extracted, high-alcohol wines in favor of lighter and livelier reds. That’s a trend we’ve been tracking for at least a decade, but in our latest round of interviews this seems to be coalescing into a new category: chilled reds.
“When I worked at Osteria Mozza,maybe six years ago, I did a chilled-red lunch and nobody showed up,” says Sarah Clarke, now at LA’s Mankze and République. “People thought I was crazy. And now, people love it. I think that people like it on both sides. It gets red drinkers to try something new—maybe they don’t want to go with big, rich reds in the middle of the summer—and I also think it’s something that people who drink mostly white can lean into.”
Demand for chilled reds is strong in warmer regions of the country. Rebecca Phillips of Vintage Wine + Eats in LA observes, “We’re in Los Angeles, where nine months out of the year it’s hot during the day. We have this fun category of fruit-forward, juicy, glug-glug wines. We do the carbonic syrah from Solminer right now. We have Breaking Bread Zinfandel, we cycle that one on the list a lot. We fly through it.” At Macchialina in Miami Beach, Jackie Pirolo says customers can’t get enough of it. “Crushable, chillable reds. That’s all anybody’s asking for.”
The work day starts with pasta: Maricela (Mary) Ramirez, a prep cook on Rose Mary‘s morning shift, sprinkles flour on pasta as it comes off of the roller.
Sometimes it’s hard to know where rosé ends and chilled red begins. At Flour+Water Hospitality in San Francisco, Sam Bogue talks about bridging these categories. “I really lean into more serious styles of rosé, like Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo, wines that see a little bit more maceration and have more tannic structure and overall herbaceous and savory tones. In many ways, they drink like a lighter and fresher style of red wine.”
Chilled reds have begun to encompass other wines that defy categorization, like the Portuguese field blends that Evelyn Goreshnik of California’s Last Word Hospitality likes to list. The problem is where to list them. “I find that putting it as a light, chilled red moves it along a little bit easier than, say, [listing it as] a deep rosé. With these wines, there will be 20 red [varieties] in the blend and 20 white. It’s as much a white wine as it is a red wine. For me, it works the best as one of the first few reds mentioned because it’ll be the lightest. Even though it’s technically not red, it’s going to move because it’s a lighter-looking red wine. And creating a new category for people just creates more confusion.”
“We’ve always drunk our red wine chilled. That’s just always the way we served it: fifty-eight degrees, cellar temp. Now if we just say it’s chilled, it’ll sell.” —Justin Chearno, The Four Horseman, Brooklyn, NY
Christine Wright has been listing chilled reds for years at NYC’s Hearth and offers selections from multiple regions. “I feel like it’s important to keep the price point on the lower side,” she says, “as they’re just chugging wines. I find that the people that really go for them are younger people, so maybe they don’t have the budget of someone that’s going to drink Burgundy.” Wright has seen an evolution in customer tastes, first for rosé, then orange, and now chilled red. She lists those three categories together on a page titled “Rainbow Wine.”
At The Four Horsemen in Brooklyn, chilled reds have taken off. “It’s the biggest thing for people in my wine world,” Justin Chearno reports. “It’s the biggest seller. We don’t sell rosé at all anymore. That was kind of taken over by orange wine, and now chilled red actually overtook orange for the first time since we’ve been open.” He goes on to say that, though chilled reds are trendy, to him and his staff, they’re just reds. “We’ve always drunk our red wine chilled. That’s just always the way we served it: fifty-eight degrees, cellar temp. Now, if we just say it’s chilled, it’ll sell.”
The next essay in our sommelier interview series, From Rosé to Orange, details the rise in sales of skin-contact wines.
is the Italian wine editor at Wine & Spirits magazine.
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This story appears in the print issue of Spring 2024.
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