Every year I swear I won’t write any Christmas wine stories, and every year I write a bunch of Christmas wine stories.  In the traditional view of things, lying makes me a bad little boy and takes me off Santa’s ‘A’ List.

Whatever, Fatso.  I don’t want you knowing when I’m sleeping anyway—what if I have morning wood?

Anyway, I stumbled upon a cool little rosé today that turned out, despite having a screw cap and no Champagne cage, to be quite effervescent.  In fact, poured into a sparkling wine flute, with its frothy mousse, it looks very much like Santa’s hat upside down.  If you invert it to see if you can make it look like Santa’s hat right side up, it will spill all over your Yuletide frippery and spoil the occasion, so word up, homies.

Lago Cerqueira, from Portugal’s Douro region is technically a Vinho Verde, which despite meaning ‘green wine’, simply means that the wine is young ; it has nothing to do with color.  Vinho Verde can be white, red, or in this case, pink.  We call a novice in any endeavor a ‘greenhorn’ for the same reason: Not because they are Wicked Witch color, but because, like novice peppers, green things sometimes ripen into red things.

Since green and red are colors that symbolize the season, let’s make it clear that Lago Cerqueira Rosé, like most Vinho Verde, is not supposed to mature into anything other than what it is.  A youthful, basic, inexpensive porch-pounder (or in this case, hearth pounder) meant to be consumed  soon after bottling—a wine that can be appreciated for the aspect of the subject that is crucially missing from most highly-promoted wines: Quality-level fun.

And for the price tag (around $10) Lago Cerqueira Rosé certainly has enough to offer.  It is fruity and frizzante, mostly cherry and citrus flavors, with pink grapefruit being the most isolatable note.  It’s full and tart on the palate, but it is not supposed to be a sparkling wine—thus, the fizz fades fast.

But no worries—at ten bucks a bottle and ten percent alcohol, the wine will disappear before the bubbles do.