Abag of Babybels, a bowl of leftover dal – even by civilian standards, there is rarely anything glamorous about the contents of my fridge. So it is with a pleasurable shiver of surprise that every time I have opened my fridge over the past week, a bottle of blush-pink Provençal rosé has been casting a rosy glow over my parmesan rinds and Tupperware. Because this is not just any wine; this is Whispering Angel, Adele’s favourite, and the most talked-about tipple of the year. If a song called I Drink Wine didn’t make her #relatable enough, the singer, who is said to be worth £140m, recently revealed her chosen tipple to be this upmarket (£18.99) supermarket wine. Adele told US Vogue that her first lockdown grocery trip was for ketchup and Whispering Angel, which “turned me into a barking dog. It did not make me whisper.” The flagship wine of Château d’Esclans, a vineyard north of Saint-Tropez, Whispering Angel is credited with not only rebooting the current trend for Provençal rosé, but turning around the entire category. Once seen as naff, rosé has exploded in popularity in the past five years – market analyst GlobalData says global consumption will climb from 2.23bn litres in 2020 to 2.63bn in 2025 – helped by Whispering Angel. It is now the bestselling French rosé in the US, drunk by celebrities from the Beckhams to Malia Obama (who was papped, still underage, with a bottle on a Miami poolside). The price and hype are driven by its champagne-style branding, but mainly its Instagrammable shade and celebrity sheen. Over the past year, a blush-pink glass, somewhere between Pantone’s ever-popular Conch shell and the much-discussed millennial pink, has become as much an influencer trope as a pumpkin spice latte or a Diptyque candle, with about 60,000 photos tagged #whisperingangel on Instagram, many against a white-sand beach or a skyscraper skyline. Last year, a case of Whispering Angel was one selling point of a £5,000 concierge service offered by a private jet charter company for US travellers to the UK – “to take the stress out of the 14-day quarantine”. There are now pop-up Whispering Angel bars in the Hamptons and the Bahamas. “The richest people I know always have a bottle chilling,” said my LA-born, UK-based, most-Hollywood friend, eyes lighting up to find one in my fridge. My other visitors – standing politely by the open door as I tried to explain – seemed bemused. She continued: taken to a dinner party, a bottle of Whispering Angel subtly says that you “have serious expendable income but are also modest and trendy”. Naturally, I asked her to join me for my first taste, as a sort of transatlantic cultural sommelier. Like everyone who knows nothing about wine, we started with the colour. Golden sand under a red sunset, I hazarded. Rose quartz? An old Glossier pouch? The pelicans in St James’s Park? Ms Hollywood shoved an image on her phone screen in my face. “The dress in Fragonard’s The Swing?” she ventured. “Rococo pink?!” Then we gave up, too pleasantly tipsy to be bothered finding more words to describe it. Whispering Angel has been said to have a “haunting, cantaloupe-tinged aroma, silky texture and bracingly dry finish”, according to one vendor. All I can tell you is that, more than any other alcohol I have tried, it slips down like water. “Dangerously so,” agrees Guardian wine writer Fiona Beckett (and a longtime rosé champion). She describes Whispering Angel as “perfectly decent”: “It’s light, it’s fresh, it’s creamy – there are very few people who wouldn’t like it.” As to whether it’s worth £20, she says that’s not really the point. She likens it to buying fancy moisturiser when a budget brand would do the job. “It’s about image … You can get decent rosé for around the £10 mark – but it’s not Whispering Angel.” (Beckett recommends Aldi’s.) In fact “ambitious” pricing, key to the perception of a premium product, has helped make rosé credible the way that Nyetimber did English champagne, and Seedlip alcohol-free spirits, Beckett says: “Some will say ‘You’re joking, £19 for rosé?’, but enough people will buy it for it to take off as a category leader … They’re selling an experience you can share in without being a multimillionaire.” Whispering Angel may not yet have the name recognition in the UK that it does in the US, but it was on its way even before Adele’s unofficial endorsement. Sales have tripled in the past two years, even though most would consider £19 a splurge. Taken alongside the increase in sales of mid-priced, premium alcohol brands in the pandemic, it speaks to the collective thirst for a little luxury at a time of great constraints. As Beckett hinted, there is precedent for this: cosmetics sales have historically bucked economic recession. In 2001, Estée Lauder’s chairman dubbed it the “lipstick index”. Ten years later, a similar swell was recorded in nail polish sales. But the pandemic proved different. Housebound and isolated, many of us were left craving a sense of occasion that a new lipstick just can’t touch. Consumers were reported to be “trading up” on food and wine, spending what they were saving at bars and restaurants on recreating the experience at home. Whispering Angel, promising celebrity glitz on a supermarket budget and a name that’s easy to pronounce, was perfectly positioned. The fact that it looked good on your feed was the cherry on top. To Sacha Lichine, founder and president of Château d’Esclans, it is proof of the power of the Whispering Angel brand, built over 15 years as “affordable luxury” and turning rosé’s fortunes around. When Lichine acquired the vineyard in 2006, he says “nobody took the category seriously.” But Lichine had grown up in the wine business (his late father was the entrepreneur Alexis Lichine, the so-called “Pope of Wine”) and saw the potential for rosé to follow in the example of Cloudy Bay, which effectively created the export market for New Zealand sauvignon blanc in the mid-1980s. Lichine envisaged the same quaffable crispness, with added south-of-France sex appeal: “I said, ‘Let’s see if we can make Provençal rosé grand and good – as opposed to just cheap and cheerful’.” The next step was to get it to the right people. Lichine travelled the world with bottles in bags, persuading the “chicest and best establishments” to put Château d’Esclans wines on their lists. Soho House, Chiltern Firehouse, Château Marmont, Annabel’s of London, the top resorts of St Barts and Barbados – Lichine drops names faster than I can take them down. “We wanted to make sure it was in the right mouths and right homes,” he says. “Once you are in all these places, and people start seeing Whispering Angel everywhere, that’s when it takes off, because that’s when it becomes aspirational.” Whispering Angel went from selling 800 cases in the US in 2007, the year of its debut, to 300,000 in 2017. Two years later, Möet Hennessy acquired the controlling share in Château d’Esclans for an undisclosed sum. Lichine says they stayed away from Instagram as long as they could, fearing it would diminish the brand. He mentions a reality-TV dynasty whom he believes enjoy Whispering Angel, but adds: “I wouldn’t want to see them drinking it on social media.” Adele talking about it in Vogue is, by contrast, a “wonderful endorsement”. In our social-media driven age, says Kelly O’Hanlon, lecturer in PR and media at Birmingham City University, people want to share in the celebrity lifestyle, if only for a night: “While Whispering Angel is not the cheapest bottle on the shelf, it isn’t completely inaccessible, so will be enticing for fans who want to sample what it’s like to be Adele.” But where Whispering Angel elevates my fridge above leftover lentils, in Adele’s it shows her to be down to earth and “great craic” (to quote one representative response to her interview). Therein lies the brand’s power. For a celebrity status symbol, it is relatively affordable, but among the rich, it signals a lack of pretension that carries its own premium. When in 2018, Late Show host Stephen Colbert asked Lady Gaga how she winds down, she replied: “I drink wine and cry, just like everybody else.” To her palpable relief, Colbert produced a chilled bottle of Whispering Angel and two glasses. For luxury travellers brought down to earth by the pandemic, Whispering Angel was a taste of disrupted routines. But for most of us, it’s selling a lifestyle we’ll never know. As someone who will never fly by private jet, I was surprised by the pleasure I took from the pink bottle, glowing like a gem inside my fridge. My usual tipple is a £7 pinot grigio, but I confess that, a week after my taste of “affordable luxury”, I haven’t put the bottle in the recycling yet.