Superficially Rose

Taking pink to its trendy heights in Saint-Tropez

It is an early summer day in the Saint-Tropez port, which is lined with mega-yachts and suntanned tourists, and Gregoire Chaix fills my glass with a pink liquid he predicts I will not like.

“You are not the target market for this—at all,” the Tropezien winemaker and entrepreneur says at a table of his restaurant, the Bar du Port.

He is pouring—over ice—his 10-year-old invention called Ice Tropez, a sweet and fizzy pink wine cocktail flavored with peach extract that comes in a cylindrical clear glass bottle or a pink can. It tastes like a cross between rose and Snapple and comes in two versions: one with a low alcohol level of 6.5 percent and a non-alcoholic one made with grape juice.

“The target is young, mostly women, who want something festive and sweet,” he explains. At 45, with a shaved head, tails-out white shirt and jeans, he is the image of a southern French businessman. “Today we need new ways to get young people into wine.”

So, why am I here?

Because pink wine is booming and fashionable, and Chaix represents a wing of the trendy camp here in jet-set Saint-Tropez: “Rose is about vacation, pleasure, the beach,” he says. But also because when Chaix is not making his wine cocktail, he is a serious-minded Côtes de Provence producer at his Domaine Tropez, in neighboring Gassin.

The son of a surgeon, Chaix studied business and marketing. At 25, he began taking over vineyards that had been worked for decades by his grandfather, who sold his wines to a local cooperative.

Chaix produced red, white and rose wines, working nearly 30 acres with little help and without herbicides or chemical fertilizers. From the start, he was determined to break from the anonymous wine mold of his grandfather.

“It was a time when Provence rose was beginning to take off,” he says. “I tried to take an approach based on marketing—something more in tune with my generation.”

As Domaine Tropez’ sales grew, he took over more and more acreage from his grandfather. Then in 2000, when he inherited his family’s traditional bar-tobacconist at the Bar du Port, he broke with the past again and turned the place into a late-night bar/dance club.

Ice Tropez came about, says Chaix, because “I decided to mix my two worlds—the milieu of wine and the milieu of party.” He began with 5,000 bottles sold mostly at the bar.

“I started with the idea of a rose with peach flavors, like a Bellini,” says Chaix, who employed an enology lab to help perfect the recipe. Ultimately, he abandoned the idea of using real rose wine in the mix, as there was too much color variation among batches. Instead, he settled on a “neutral” white wine from the Languedoc region that is colored with red fruit extract, flavored with peach, watered down, sweetened and carbonated at a Provence bottling plant.

He now sells about 3 million 9-ounce bottles of Ice Tropez a year, exporting to 40 countries. With its high profit margin, Chaix says, the beverage has helped him invest in his restaurants and winery.

Domaine Tropez produces more than 18,000 cases of estate wines in Chaix’ modern steel-and-glass winery. At its sleek roadside tasting boutique, along with whites and reds, the domaine offers three well-made and refreshingly tasty Grenache-dominated roses. The main rose is a typical citrusy Provence rose; then there is White Tropez—a smooth and aromatic, almost-white rose—and Black Tropez, a slightly more structured, pale salmon–colored wine from a plot of old vines.

Chaix also releases 50,000 cases from his negociant business under the labels Sand Tropez and Crazy Tropez.

Meanwhile, Chaix’s Bar du Port is growing up. This season it was transformed into a seafood and Mediterranean restaurant with a wine list featuring Provence classics such as Domaine La Suffrène Bandol red and Château Simone red and white from the Palette appellation, along with rose Champagnes topped by Dom Perignon and Cristal.

The bar also pours Provence roses by the glass, including one of Saint-Tropez’ original ultrapale roses, Château Barbeyrolles Petale de Rose.

For an extra charge of 2 euros, the bar serves its roses (and Champagnes) “en piscine” fashion—literally “in swimming pool”—in an oversized glass full of ice cubes.

Ice and wine? In recent years, that’s been debated in France. But when summer heats up in Saint-Tropez, and the pink stuff starts flowing, no one seems concerned.