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LONG ISLAND VINES A Charming Rosé Do you enjoy a candy-box bouquet? It's here. Do you sometimes yearn for a $10 semisweet wine that's a nosh, a confection, the North Fork equivalent of a playful white zinfandel? It's here. Do you like the nutritional value of cotton candy? It's here. Do you savor a compote of tropical fruit? It's here. Do you relish an aftertaste that never never never ends? It's here. Now you may think - to borrow the title of a book by Erasmus I read long ago - that this is all "Praise of Folly." But you'd be wrong. This is praise of serious frivolity. I would not praise frivolous frivolity, because it has no mind, no taste, no judgment, behind it. But serious frivolity - like a carefully thought out, deftly made piece of costume jewelry - deserves attention. Paumanok's rosé (made from merlot grapes) expresses the same care and attention that Charles and Ursula Massoud bestow on their rieslings.- It isn't far in conception from their delicious 2000 semidry riesling. In short, the wine, chilled enough in a bucket to trigger tartness, is exactly what you want under a striped umbrella at the beach as you thumb through a two-inch-thick romance. Lest the winery's publicity has passed you by, Paumanok (in Aquebogue) is the Indian name for Long Island and also the title of a Walt Whitman poem (in "Leaves of Grass"). The poem celebrates an "isle of sweet brooks of drinking-water healthy air and soil! / Isle of the salty shore and breeze and brine." If the novel hasn't put you to sleep, you can find these lines on the label. HOWARD G. GOLDBERG |