The > New York City Restaurant Reviews

THE name’s Champagne. Rosé Champagne.

Not impressed? Think I sound a little — I don’t know, effete? Even marginal? Well, guess again.

In 2006 more than 1.9 million bottles of rosé Champagne — that’s me! — were exported from France to the United States. In 1995 it was a mere 227,336 bottles, according to Office of Champagne, USA, a trade organization.

That’s an increase of more than 700 percent, I’ll have you know. Why, from 2005 to 2006 alone, exports of rosé Champagne were up by 47.5 percent.

I don’t mind saying, that’s not bad for a guy they used to call pink, especially when you consider that exports of all kinds of Champagne in 2006 were 84 percent higher than in 1995, a nice enough increase but, shall we say, anemic against my own.

Think of it this way: From 1995 to 1998, exports of rosé Champagne represented just 1.8 percent of all the Champagne shipped to the United States. In 2006 it was 8.37 percent. Let’s just say I’m smokin’! The French wine industry may be in crisis almost everywhere else, but not in Champagne.

But I tire of numbers. Here’s what I want to tell you. Recently, I was the star of a wine panel tasting. It was with that fellow Asimov and his colleague Florence Fabricant, along with a couple of guests, Christy Canterbury, corporate beverage director of Culinary Concepts by Jean-Georges, and Laura Maniec, director of wine and spirits for B. R. Guest Restaurants.

You know the drill. They tasted 25 bottles of moi-même blind. They bought them in retail stores, with the silly restriction that they cost less than 0 each, which of course ruled out some of my best buddies, like Krug and Cristal and Dom what’s-his-name.

No matter. The shelves are overflowing with rosé bubbly. And I don’t mind saying, we do cost a little more than the ordinary stuff.

Check it out: Over at Sam’s Wines and Spirits, that big shop in Chicago, you can get a bottle of the nonvintage Veuve Clicquot brut for . But the Veuve Clicquot rosé? That would be .

If you don’t already get it, one reason for the price difference is, we’re in demand! Another is that we require an extra step in production.

Some winemakers simply add a bit of red still wine to the blend before refermentation in the bottle, which gives us our fizz. Others allow the juice to macerate briefly with the pigment-laden grape skins.

Either way, we attain a beautiful color, which, by the way, is not just pink. If only you could have heard the oohs and aahs of the wine panelists as they goggled over our salmon, our onionskin, our rouge and our ruby. Does anyone have a mirror I can use?

The panelists are yammering to be heard, but, if you don’t mind, I’ll do the talking today.

Here were some of the high points: Christy marveled at the versatility of rosés, finding every possible representation of Champagne in our colorful cohort, “from oxidized and things we don’t ordinarily identify with Champagne, to residual sugar.”

Hmm, now that I think about it, I’m not sure what she meant by that. Listen to Florence instead: “Rosé Champagnes have a complexity that rosé wines can only dream about,” she said. “Still, they would take a back seat to regular Champagne.”

Huh? She must mean regular Champagne should be our chauffeur, right? What about Laura?

“I associate rosé Champagnes with more complexity and depth,” she said — nice! — “but these were medium-plus complexity at best.”

What? Sounds like industry talk. I’ll let Eric explain. He said he found as many different styles as there were shades of pink — I like that — but he also found less complexity than in ordinary Champagnes and questioned what made the rosés so popular.

Is he completely blind? Come on, we’re gorgeous! Geez, these people are useless. At least when they liked us, they really liked us.