Twenty Years of Whispering Angel: How One Rosé Changed Everything

There were rosés before there was Whispering Angel, but only in the way that there were colas before there was Coke. Yes, ex-pats had long sloshed glasses of pink wine – often in the ‘piscine’ style, tinkling with a fistful of crushed ice – at their second homes in Provence and the Languedoc. And yes, winey-types would tell you that something like a fine Bandol, with its heady blushing tones, could rival many grander appellations for beauty and guile. But Sacha Lichine’s genius, more than a quarter of a century ago now, was to see that rosé could be rosé, so to speak. A wine as celebratory and brand-led as a champagne, and as mineral-edged and thirst-slaking as a white Burgundy. A wine whose pretty, peachy tones – long considered neither-here-nor-there between the stately pillars of red and white – might well be part of its sensual appeal. But mostly Lichine – a proper bon vivant who is often rightly described as ‘Falstaffian’ in his outlook – seemed to simply like what it stood for: a glass of the good life, unpretentious and celebratory; that ‘beaker of the warm south’ that good old Keats longed for.

There is not much you can do to rosé, though Lichine and his Chateau d’Esclans have raised its ageing and finessing to an entirely new level over the past two decades. But classically it’s a wine best bottled fresh, unaged, unoaked, youthful, sprightly, cold – bursting from the ground in the hills above the Cote d’Azur like miraculous spring water. And so the mood, the tone, the detail, is what really makes the difference in the glass and the imagination. The name is perhaps the great masterstroke. Lichine is said to have come up with it while admiring the carved stonework on the d’Esclans estate, when he saw two carved angels leaning close, one apparently whispering to the other. It is universal and distinctive. A psychologist will tell you that the combination of ‘adjective-noun’ is particularly potent. We remember pink elephants much more vividly than plain old elephants. And so the Whispering Angel echoes.

It’s approachable, too, even in its subtle elegance. Anyone can say it, anywhere in the world. And now they do, almost everywhere – the Hamptons (they really love it there first), Hollywood, Hammersmith. This ubiquity would have been almost unthinkable at the start of the century. A super rosé. The rosé we talk about when we talk about rosé. But it now feels pretty normal – indeed, almost inevitable – which is probably the true marker of any wine’s success.

The marque is celebrating its 20th vintage this summer, and has just released a limited edition 2025 bottling to mark the occasion. (The first was in 2006.) It will likely become something of a collector’s item – but one that will always be more at home in the ice bucket than the museum case.