Jason's Wine Blog

I’ve just updated the website to use the word “Rose” (missing the accent) where we had been using “Blush” in the past.

What are you talking about?

Well, “rosé” and “blush” are most commonly used to refer to the same thing: wines that are neither Red nor White. These wines are different shades of pink. In fact, “rose” means “pinkish” in French.

According to Wikipedia, “Blush” was originally coned by Charlie Kreck of Millcreek Vineyards in Sonoma to describe a pink colored wine he made from Cabernet grapes. Kreck trademarked the name, but that didn’t stop other American wineries from using it to describe their pink, semi-sweet wines.

Purists may only use Rose for French or European wines and Blush for American wines, but in general both terms are interchangeably.

Why did you choose Blush in the first place?

I don’t remember what I was thinking at the time. I was even more of a wine novice then than I am now. It was pretty tough to make decisions on what terminology to use. The wine industry is not one to standardize.

I remember struggling with “Variety” vs. “Varietal” as well. I went with “variety” because it seemed less snobish to me. If I had to make the decision now, I’d probably go with “varietal”. I still think it’s a snobbier word, but in my experience it doesn’t turn people off like I thought it would. People are excited to learn “the lingo” use the terminology specific to wine.

Back to blush. I probably thought “rose” was the more pretentious word. “Blush” seemed safer as it simply described the color of the wine, whereas folks seem more inclined to attribute more… stuff… to a “rose” vs. a “blush”.

So why switch to rose now?

“Rose” is used more often than “blush” these days. That’s it really. It is more often used on online stores and other sites.

I’m also giving in a little to wine snobs. There is a sense that one wouldn’t want to refer to a serious wine as a “blush” wine. This site is for the average Joe and Jane wine drinker first, but I respect the wine snobs and would like them to use our site too… or at least scoff a little less at our site.

Why no accent on the e in rose?

We generally strip accents out of wine names, etc, on the site because accented characters can cause issues with searches and links and all kinds of stuff.

It is a solvable problem. One I’ve poured many hours into already. It takes a lot of effort to make sure all the pieces that run this website (PHP, MySQL, HTML, your web browser) all handle that accented e the same way. And I don’t want people searching for “rose” without the accent to miss wines that happen to be spelled with an accent… and visa-versa.

In the end, I’ve decided that my time is better used on other programming tasks on the site.

As always, please let me know if you see anything funny on the site after this change. And I hope to see some good rose vs. blush discussion in the comments. Don’t let me down.