Long before his name was on handbags in Milan and Tokyo, Domenico Dolce was a boy working in his family’s small clothing shop in Polizzi Generosa, a mountain town above Palermo. Decades later, he and Stefano Gabbana have put their names on a Sicilian wine, and it’s dressed in the island’s colours.
The label on Rosa borrows its pattern from the painted carts of Sicily, the brightly decorated wooden carretti that once carried goods along the island’s roads and now turn up at village festivals. Dolce & Gabbana have been drawing on that folk art for years, on dresses, handbags and even kitchen appliances, so it seems fitting that their first wine should wear it too. When the designers talk about Rosa, they describe it as being like tasting the smells of their land, which ought to sound like marketing, except that with these two it’s the whole brand.
A designer wine from a dependable house
I’ll admit that designer wines usually make me raise an eyebrow, and my nose goes into serious-critic mode before I’ve even taken a sniff.
What reassured me here was the winery.
Rosa is made by Donnafugata, and I’ve never had a bad wine from them at any price. I’ve seen their wines enjoyed by everyone from grandparents to teenagers around a long Sicilian family table, which strikes me as both very Sicilian and very Dolce & Gabbana.
Rosa is as pale as the Provence rosés everyone loves, but it’s made from traditional Sicilian grapes: the lighter Nerello Mascalese, best known from the slopes of Etna, blended with the darker, livelier Nocera. The winery describes notes of jasmine with hints of wild strawberry, peach and bergamot, and the colour, somewhere close to rose quartz, is as calming as a sunny day by the sea. In a bottle dressed this boldly, it’s a surprisingly gentle wine, and I mean that as a compliment.
Holidays, in a fashion
Rosa arrived in the strange first summer of the pandemic, when Champagne sales had fallen sharply because few people were in the mood to celebrate. Rosé was a different matter. When lockdown eased that May, one UK supermarket reported rosé sales up more than 400% on the year before, and a glass of pink wine seemed just the thing to take our minds off all the Zoom and gloom.
The bottle took me straight back to holidays in Sicily, to long beach lunches with a big plate of pasta, where every glass of wine needs to be drunk in dark sunglasses.
That summer in 2020, we were all at home instead, and none of us could get to Sicily. The boy from Polizzi Generosa had found a way to bring it to us, painted in the colours of an old Sicilian cart and poured into a glass.
Archive note: First published in June 2020, when Rosa was launched through the Dolce & Gabbana website and imported to the UK by Liberty Wines. The 2019 was the first vintage. Donnafugata’s estate is at Contessa Entellina, in western Sicily.
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