The Rosé Disruptor: A conversation with Sommelier / Co-Patron Tom Fahey, The Terrace Rooms & Wine
- James Massoud
- Dec 11, 2025
- 9 min read
Rosé isn’t just a summer fling on the Isle of Wight – not when Tom Fahey is pouring it. Ranked #12 in Harpers’ Top 50 Sommeliers in the UK and co-patron of The Terrace Rooms & Wine in Ventnor, Fahey has made the island an unlikely pilgrimage spot for serious wine lovers. His immersive rosé courses, held in a bottle wine cave overlooking the English Channel, introduce guests to the full spectrum of the world’s most misunderstood wine: from feather-pale Provençal styles to dark, bone-dry rosés, funky natural bottlings, oaked rosés that drink like Pinot Noir and even 10-year-old aged examples.
But Fahey’s approach goes beyond education. It’s about stripping back the noise, pairing hyper-local Isle of Wight ingredients with carefully chosen bottles, and giving guests the confidence to buy wine they’ll genuinely love. As The Terrace racks up major awards for Best Rosé and Best Pinot Noir Wine Lists in the UK, Fahey sits down with The Knife to talk rosé myths, island hospitality and why wine always tastes better by the sea.
You’ve become known for blowing up people’s preconceptions of rosé. What’s the single biggest misconception you love dismantling in your immersion courses?
That pale rose is dry and dark rose is sweet. There is actually no link at all between the colour of a rosé and the amount of sugar it contains. This misconception stems from the rise of white zin as a high-sugar "gateway" wine that legions of teenagers fell out of love with as their palates matured with Insta-cool Provence rosé arriving as an ultra-polarised gap filler.
Your rosé lineup ranges from feather-pale and fruit-forward to oaked, funky and 10-years-aged. Which style do you personally think is overlooked and why do you think guests so rarely encounter it?
I absolutely love barrel-fermented rosé. It’s a popular misconception that any wine seeing oak is going to be smoky, vanilla-dominated or buttery. The reality is barrel age, size and time in wood produce a huge spectrum of different impacts, which in rosé I find most delicious when large, old oak barrels are used to amplify depth of fruit flavour without any need to retain sugar. Why don’t consumers get to taste these wines with regularity? Likely because when you put a darker rosé on a shelf it won’t sell, but also because the current trend is for light, fresh, zippy rosés with very little actual flavour.
When you guide people to the "rosé they’ll truly love", what tells you more about a guest: the wines they think they like or the foods they instinctively gravitate towards?
100% the wines they enjoy drinking, which nine times out of 10 are going to be pale, crisp and "Provence-like" or "the paler the better". I have two wines I like to pour in these instances: one is a New Zealand rosé made from half pinot gris and half pinot noir grapes. It’s the palest in the hotel, but also has one of the highest sugar contents – about 7g of residual sugar per-litre. I then pour a fairly dark Provence rosé that has zero sugar and was aged for a year in a steel tank. The Provence rosé has a lot more fruit flavour but no sugar, the New Zealand rosé has higher sugar but lower fruit content. Together the two wines highlight the difference between taste and flavour in wine and open the door to understanding the relationship between colour and sugar in rosé while also being very well made and very delicious.
The Terrace's wine room holds around 950 bottles. What’s the most surprising rosé (or rosé-adjacent wine) hiding in there that you enjoy pulling out purely to mess with people’s expectations?
It’s actually 1200 now. We have three wines from a single producer in Bordeaux that fulfils this exact role. One is a pale rosé, one is a very dark rosé and one is a red. They are all made from merlot grapes from the same vineyard by the same winemaker. Tasting them in sequence shows how the use of skins, picking times, fermentation temperatures and aging vessels create completely different wines from the same grape. The dark rosé is a complete and utter head scratcher for most guests as it's bone dry but so full, spicy and ripe, it’s usually this wine that guests purchase to take away as opposed to the more familiar red or pale rosé.
Your courses strip out the fluff and focus on what people actually want to know. What’s one detail the wine world obsesses over that you think most guests genuinely don’t care about?
Soil. It is 100% true that soil types impact drainage, vine health and temperature in the vineyard, but in terms of the eventual product in the glass I would argue that wine making decisions influenced by commercial positioning of a wine have a far, far greater impact, and it’s one that consumers can relate to far more when tasting. Sommeliers and winemakers can often romanticise soil as having a direct flavour impact on wine, particularly in terms of such potentially quite esoteric concepts such as "minerality", that most consumers find incredibly difficult to relate to in terms of the taste, texture and flavour they experience in the glass.
The best thing about selling wine on the Isle of Wight is also the worst thing about it. I have a really nice library of rare and under the radar cult wines at very low drink in prices. On the mainland I’m pretty sure I’d be unable to maintain this stock as in-the-know drinkers would snap it up, leading to pricing more in line with what I actually should be charging as my stock runs down and I need new, equally exciting lines to replace those I’ve sold. The Solent acts as a bit of a barrier to this, reducing the sale of rarities. While we attract a lot of "wine interested" guests, it’s rare we get wine lovers who know how to pick out the special stuff, which makes my buying life a great deal easier. Ultimately, we are a hotel that offers a wine tasting with all stays. While some of my buying is based on targeting a world-class lineup of quality growers, another part of it is based on building a library of wines that, poured comparatively, can be used to illustrate the key points we want to convey in those tastings. If I was in London I doubt I’d have been able to afford a hotel!
The Terrace’s Friday pairing dinners are built entirely around Isle of Wight produce, down to citrus, Sichuan pepper, ginger and even eucalyptus. How does hyper-locality change the way you think about pairing compared to a more classic sommelier toolkit?
It’s funny because the library of ingredients I have here are very restrictive yet haven’t limited me in exploring the flavour matching concept that’s become my wine pairing signature. I can get the truffles, wild mushrooms, cherries, beetroots and game I need to make a sauce that blends seamlessly into the flavours of a classic Burgundian pinot noir. I can get the gooseberries, elderflower and asparagus that I used to make a warm tartare sauce that mirrors the flavours in quality Marlborough or Loire sauvignon blanc. If anything, wanting to do these kind of pairings has influenced my cooking to become more about preservation of flavours I want to use year round as opposed to 100% reactive to whatever comes through the door that week.
You host tastings overlooking the English Channel. Be honest, how much does setting influence flavour? Do you think wines actually taste different by the sea or is the brain playing tricks?
My feeling is that setting influences flavour positively whenever guests are relaxed and enjoying themselves. I suspect that when guests buy into what we’re doing in our tastings and want to try new things, they relax, embrace the unfamiliar and enjoy the wines. Conversely, if guests approach the tasting as something a bit intimidating or "not for them", it’s quite likely they won’t like the wines regardless of sea views. To the extent being by the sea in a room covered in wine makes guests happy, I’m absolutely sure there is a positive impact on how much they enjoy what we pour. I always say that there are four preceptors in how we experience wine: taste, texture, flavour and, the final one, emotion. Emotion is far and away the most important and is tied to experience, preconception and attachment. As much as I can explain why wines have the taste, texture and flavour they do based on wine-making, commercial factors and climate, I can’t (and don't!) challenge the emotional attachment or dislike of certain styles or particular brands of wine. I just ignore them and cry myself to sleep afterwards.
Rosé is often treated as a "summer wine", yet your tastings feature dark, crimson and even oaked rosés with real winter food energy. Which rosé styles should people be drinking in winter but never do?
There is a rosé we sell a lot of called Les Grenadines. It changes each year but is typically 20% red wine and 80% long maceration rosé. It tastes of cranberries, cloves and dried orange peel; we call it Christmas rosé, and it’s perfect for roast turkey with flavours that summon all the positive flavour associations of the festive period. The 2024 vintage seems to have become a light red, we’re hoping this is shifted back in 2025. In the meantime, try any quality Tavel or old-vine Navarran Garnacha for a similar – but not quite as specific – impact.
You talk a lot about helping guests find wines they’ll love, not just understand. What’s your favourite moment during a course when you can actually see someone’s palate switch on?
Our tannin explainer tasting is absolutely brilliant for this. We have a lot of guests who don’t like red wine because it’s "too dry". What they’re actually referring to is the drying sensation created by tannin extracted from the grape skins during fermentation. We use three wines to illustrate how drinkers perceive tannin in wine including how grape size, fermentation temperature and sugar levels influence this. We finish the tasting with a piece of cheese paired to the final, very high tannin red. Looking at people’s faces as the tannin simply vanishes and the wine become "smooth" is incredibly rewarding.
The property recently took home awards for both Best Rosé Wine List and Best New Zealand List in the UK. If someone arrives saying they "don’t like rosé" and "don’t drink Pinot Noir", how do you deal with that challenge?
I say "excellent!" and pour them a white pinot noir; I have two, one from Otago and one from Surrey. I then seize the opportunity to expand their wine horizons by detailing how the idea of grape type as a determiner of wine style is a relatively modern concept pushed by big retail and big wine to fix consumer expectations as simple and manageable. I mean, I might not do this as it sounds a bit dull, but at least they’ve been enjoying a really nice colour-free pinot noir.
You’re known for giving unfiltered answers, so here’s an unfiltered question: what’s a wine industry belief, trend or bit of snobbery you wish would disappear tomorrow?
The word "snobbery" as used by wine communicators to justify a dumbed down approach that panders to consumer misconceptions. I get it, consumers have a lot of class-related hangups about wine, but the reality is wine is just about pleasure and knowing more about it can only help in terms of increasing that pleasure. It’s not snobbery to use knowledge to make better drinking choices – be it in terms of deliciousness, health or sustainability. The idea of a suited sommelier looking down on brave little Englanders venturing out for their first fine dining experience only to be fleeced on something fundamentally average dressed up in incomprehensible jargon is an anachronism. I don’t know any wine professionals who want to rip the public off, most of them are truly passionate about wine and enjoy nothing more than giving the right person the right bottle at the right price. But I do know a lot of wine communicators who want to make their audience feel better about their fundamentally unsustainable big-brand drinking choices by contrasting the "ordinary" and "honest" nature of a £12 Nineteen Crimes with the "snobbery" and "exclusiveness" of a really good wine made by a tiny producer who genuinely cares about quality. It really makes me quite cross in fact. Snobbery is a redundant term in wine that has actually become a weapon for the very people who claim to decry it.
