Here is the story of how the very first rosé isn’t one at all, except it’s the best. I refer to Tavel, the name of the wine and of the small town in the South of France where it is grown and made.

Tavel lies on the right (east) bank of the Rhône just north of Avignon, and opposite its left bank twin, the much better known, Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The two towns, and the wines they are famous for, form a kind of ying and yang of the Southern Rhône. They share the same climate, the same soil types and are made with the same combination of grapes, with Grenache usually acting as the dominant one in the blend.

They also have a history of papal patronage going back to the middle ages, not just at Avignon but also in Rome. But while the wines of Châteauneuf have always been coveted for their brooding dark fruit, Tavel has always been a red wine made in a clear lighter style. It’s just that no one thought to call it rosé until the last half of the 20th century.

The colour of a wine depends partly on the grape variety, or varieties, used to make it. But while you can’t make red wine from white grapes, you can make orange wine from them, and you can certainly make white wine from red grapes.

This is because the way to extract colour from grapes, that have begun to ferment into wine, is to leave the juice that has been pressed from the fruit, in contact with the skins. In Champagne they make Blanc-de-Noir, a white sparkling wine, by separating Pinot Noir from its skins right away.

Some red wines might be left to “macerate” on their skins for several days, and if the winemaker wants to intensify the process, she might “bleed” some of the juice off of the skins. Bleeding red wines is, in fact, a way to make rosé with the juice that has been removed, though it’s not how they make Tavel.

The rules for making Tavel are ancient and as clear as the wine: contact with the skins will be for the one night after the grapes have been pressed. This is enough to make Tavel a deep pink verging on ruby red.

In the two decades that I have been writing about wine, I have watched rosé go from a niche product to an established one. In the warm weather months, it’s become unremarkable to be offered a glass of rosé in the backyard of a friend.

The style of rosé that is predominant here and around the world is ‘Provençal’: a crisp with a light coppery or salmon hue. This colour would have come from very limited skin contact. Generally speaking, I like these wines fine, but for the nearly always present note of strawberry, they may as well be white wines.

There’s no structure, nor weight on the palate. Lacking complexity, they strike me as being designed to be drunk quick and cold on a warm evening. The Provençal-style rosés serve their purpose, but there are very few of them that could carry a diner through a meal.

Tavel is almost always recognizable on a store shelf, in part because of its distinct tall and skinny clear bottle, but mostly for its deep pink colour. The colour is the clue that the wine will have some tannic structure and weight from being on its skins overnight. Those skins provide more than texture, they also provide flavour. Beyond strawberry are the red fruit flavours associated with Grenache, like cherry and raspberry. Tavel wines really do show more like a very light and racy red with a line of acidity that will take them through from aperitif to a main course of grilled meat.

In 1936 Tavel was named as one of France’s first Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, demarcated by a small area of land around the town, and given the restriction that only “Tavel” (in other words, rosé that’s not really rosé) could be made there. This has had the effect of keeping the production and the number of producers small.

There are only about two dozen producers, and maybe the same number of growers that sell grapes to the Tavel co-operative or one of the big houses of the Rhône Valley like Guigal or Famille Perrin.

In the past couple of decades, when faced with competition from the Provençal rosé the producers decided to double down on their tradition of making a ‘vin gastronomique’ instead of changing the way they make wine to follow fashion.

Unfortunately this means that Tavel has become pricier than most rosé, usually within $25 to $30 a bottle. Fortunately, though, they’ve kept their audience and seem to be growing it steadily, as Tavel wines are widely available, especially now that it’s the season for them.

As a small appellation with strict controls on production, the quality of Tavel wines is fairly uniform and consistent. The producers below are in most markets in this country and make wines that I have enjoyed very much.

Château d’Acqueria: aqueria.com

Château de Manissy: chateau-de-manissy.com

Domaine LaFond Roc-Epine: roc-epine.com

Domaine Maby: domainemaby.fr

Domaine de la Mordorée: domaine-mordoree.com

For better or worse, few subjects have captured the attention of the financial world like Bitcoin.

With each wild price swing, those that believe in the digital currency and those that call it a bubble spar on financial networks like CNBC. The recent massive selloff will be no exception (Bitcoin is up more than 250% since this time last year even after factoring in recent declines). Despite its increasing acceptance by traditional markets as a novel asset class, Bitcoin is remains seen as a “party trick” asset: part speculative investment, part inflationary hedge.

But those headlines have continued to miss out on the seismic changes that blockchain technology is ushering into the financial space, challenging the hegemony of traditional brick and mortar banks. This revolution isn’t just on its way — it’s here. Regulators and tax authorities in Canada and around the world need to begin to educate themselves on the rapid development and reinvention occurring on blockchains other than Bitcoin.

The media’s endless fixation on the wild swings in price are missing the forest for the trees.

The Bitcoin network and it’s blockchain are largely restricted to the ability to do little more than securely send, receive and hold bitcoin. This is intentional as the development of the Bitcoin network has been an emphasis on security and decentralization.

The second largest digital asset, Ethereum, operates in a more dynamic way. Users can launch and utilize digital contracts on the network, allowing hundreds of people to bind themselves into financial and commercial contracts, enforceable without relying on lawyers, banks, regulators or central banks. Like many cryptocurrency projects, the first generation of these decentralized applications (DApps) was as silly as they were impactful.

Launching in 2017 from Vancouver based Dapper Labs, CryptoKitties was a collectable game where players could buy, sell, breed and trade unique digital cats. All of these transactions occurred on the Ethereum blockchain, meaning that once launched no individual, group, or corporation was truly in control of it. Ridiculous on its face, the DApp showed the potential to create global, scalable markets out of thin air and to have them operate 24/7 with little or no outside interference.

Since 2017, the scope of DApps has expanded and matured tremendously. Today, the largest DApps are primarily focused on financial products and the size of them is enough to rival mainstream, traditional financial institutions.

One of the largest examples is Aave. Founded in 2017 out of Switzerland, Aave allows users to deposit various digital assets into smart contract as collateral for U.S. dollar pegged “stablecoin” loans. The smart contract dictates the loan/value ratio and interest owing on a per second basis. To have the original collateral released, the user must return to the smart contract the borrowed U.S. dollar stablecoin, plus (variable) interest.

Simultaneously, Aave allows users to deposit their digital assets to a separate contract and earn per second interest on those deposits. With no lock-up periods, the user can remove their deposited funds, plus interest on demand. The borrowing and lending interest rates for assets are correlated in such a way to ensure that interest paid on deposits is always equal to or less than the interest received by the lending.

All the above is done without any agents, sales, margins, or overhead 24 hours a day, seven days a week with no downtime. Crucially, the whole process is agnostic to the size of borrowed or lent amounts. There is no difference in user experience, interest, or fees if you are borrowing $100 or $10 million. The only cost to the user is a “gas fee” required by the network to access and operate the smart contract.

As of writing, Aave currently has $7.89 billion U.S. dollars worth of digital assets locked as collateral in its smart contracts. Aave is one of dozens of new financial players completely reinventing financial markets and collateralized loans.

Another major player is Uniswap. Uniswap is a fully decentralized exchange (DEX), allowing users to exchange one digital asset for another. Unlike a traditional exchange that uses an orderbook to match buyers and sellers of a specific security, Uniswap is an automated liquidity protocol. Any user can create a market by depositing a pair of assets (in equal USD amounts) into a liquidity pool. When other users want to exchange that pair of digital tokens, they complete that exchange using the pair of tokens in the liquidity pool. Users who are providing liquidity are paid a 0.3 percent fee for each exchange, which is divided proportionally amongst the liquidity providers. If the balance of a pair of assets deviates from the original 1:1 proportion, arbitrageurs are incentivized to profit from bringing the pool back to 1:1.

Just like Aave, this provides an invaluable service to digital asset traders. Those who have assets they are not using can be paid to provide liquidity to a paired pool (and withdraw whenever the want) and market gains increased efficiency between different tokens, eliminating barrier to access.

For the week ending April 20, 2021, Uniswap exchanged $10 billion USD that week. As with Aave, this market is available worldwide, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The growth of the DeFi market can tracked live on DeFi Pulse, which currently shows a total locked value across all markets of $27.2 billion.

The Ethereum network is similarly decentralized to the Bitcoin network (but in some technically different ways) and with a network upgrade projected to land at the end of 2021, the Ethereum network will eliminate the use of hardware mining to reduce its environmental impact by approximately 95%.

The promise of these new Decentralized Finance (DeFi) players is a truly global, liquid, and efficient financial system, with low fees, no overhead and no barrier to access. The World Bank estimates that 1.7 billion people worldwide remain unbanked, forced to store their wealth in cash or other physical assets, making them vulnerable to theft or government confiscation.

Digital assets offer not just a way to store their wealth securely, but equal access to a global financial system including access to capital markets they can use to start businesses and grow their quality of life. Individuals living in nations like Denmark with negative interest rates can take advantage of that and instantaneously lend their ‘free’ money to farmers in India or Pakistan with no secure access to financing.

Ethereum is laying down the internet of finance, allowing anyone globally to access markets and capital. An entrepreneurial developer can build new and more efficient ways for people to come together and see their financial needs met.

So, with all this growth and promise, where are our regulators and tax authorities? Nowhere to be seen. Does any government, provincial or federal, have a serious plan to face this financial upheaval? Can we encourage our own entrepreneurs, businesses and non-profits to find ways to become leaders in this emerging ecosystem?

It would seem the answer is no. Bitcoin and cryptocurrency remains seen by traditional finance as a novelty asset that will fade away and by government as only a tool for money launders. The implications of these new technologies are either not understood by our politicians and regulators or are being ignored in the hopes that they will simply disappear.

In a way, this isn’t surprising. Traditional institutions are loath to recognize upstart challengers to their hegemony. Decentralized finance offers lower cost, more efficient, more liquid access to global markets at a speed that traditional institutions cannot match. If they don’t start to adapt to this new world, taxpayers will be left on the hook for the inevitable bailout.

We’ve seen exactly this before. In 1995, Clifford Stoll declared in Newsweek that “no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.”

Newsweek ran its last independent print issue on December 31, 2012.