Flatiron Wines & Spirits NY

When the King of Rosé crafts another vintage of his stunning, watermelon-hued wine, we have no choice but to kiss the ring.

This king is Tamás Dúzsi, a winemaker from Hungary’s Szekszárd region. He makes a whopping 25 different wines from a variety of native and international grapes, but the wine we love to drink is his rosé of Kékfrankos, a.k.a. Blaufränkisch.

Olga Raffault is best known for red Chinon from the Les Picasses vineyard, an incredibly long-lived, classic expression of limestone terroir through a Cabernet Franc lens. Their most undeniably joyous wine, however, is this rosé. This annual favorite is in fact one of the best examples of a rosé that manages to be delicious enough for drinking on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and also complex enough that it can elevate a meal.

The first time we encountered Thibaud Boudignon’s Savennières ‘Clos de la Hutte’ it clobbered us. We didn’t know anything about Boudignon or his wines, so we expected something typical of the appellation: a wine of opulent, confit fruit flavors, dry but unctuous, maybe even honeyed. Instead, the wine was like a salty lemon laser beam melting our faces: brilliant, explosive, and precisely focused. Amazing out of the gate, it continued to blossom sip by sip, showing the kind of depth and class of a first-rate Grosses Gewächs or Grand Cru Chablis.