Until recently, pink was wine’s polarizing colour. People who knew nada about fermented grapes drank rosé. So did people who knew a lot. Pretty much everybody else feared it and stuck to white or red.
The first type of drinker typically guzzled sweet, soda-pop styles, such as American white zinfandel and the Portuguese fizzy, Mateus. The second almost exclusively sought out the dry European stuff, notably the debonair rosés of Provence and Tavel in southern France.
Now pink is red hot and edging into the mainstream. The wine press has dubbed it the “pink tide.” Among French producers, the news has been especially cheery at a time when exports of just about every other style are suffering. France now produces about six million hectolitres of rosé annually, roughly 30 per cent of the global market, up from 4.5 million hectolitres in 2002. Almost incredibly, in 2007, France began producing more rosé than white wine.
What happened? A sea change in perception. Many wine enthusiasts, especially new drinkers outside Europe, began cluing into the fact that rosé need not be a saccharine, soda-pop substitute – or what some of us think of as wine with training wheels. In fact, most serious pink is seriously dry.
It’s encouraging to watch the tide wash up a growing selection of dry offerings, not just from France, Spain and Italy, the traditional sources of the best rosés, but also such New World countries as New Zealand and Canada. Springtime is high tide for rosé wine.
At their best, dry rosés deliver an uncanny essence of summer berries, lifted by crisp acidity and often a hint of fresh herbs. They are consummate warm-weather apéritifs, but they also pair sumptuously with a variety of foods, from light vegetarian fare to simple grilled shrimp, poached salmon and ham.
They’re probably most spiritually at home with casual appetizers. In northern Spain, land of so many undervalued rosés, the pink stuff is classic with tapas, the snack plates served in bars. (Dry sherry is another favourite option, especially in southern Spain.)
Despite rosé’s growing popularity, prices remain reasonable. Many great examples sell for between $12 and $15. That said, some producers have been testing rich people’s gullibility. Domaine Ott, admittedly one of the most talked about French rosés, sells for more than $40 a bottle in Canada. You can often do just as well, in terms of elegance and complexity if not snob appeal, for half that price. It’s only rarely available in Canada anyway.
But Ott doesn’t take the cake for blushworthy shamelessness. Sacha Lichine, son of Alexis Lichine, a famous winemaker and writer in Bordeaux, charges the Canadian equivalent of roughly $150 a bottle for a relatively new rosé from his Château d’Esclans property in Provence. (It’s not currently available in Canada as far as I can tell.)
Year after year, one of the best widely distributed bargains, at least in my book, is made by the fine producer Muga, located in Spain’s northern Rioja region. Muga Rosé 2009 ($12.95 in Ontario; $15.30 in Quebec), to be released this Saturday in Ontario, along with several of the other offerings below, is a steal. Tinted a seductive salmon-pink, it offers up a pure core of strawberry, with crisp acidity lifting its medium-bodied frame. Like all rosés, it should be served well chilled.
Most quality rosé is made exclusively with red grapes. The dark skins are pulled away from the otherwise clear juice shortly after fermentation starts, leaving just a light stain of colour. You can also make rosé by blending red and white wines, but few good producers do, with the notable exception of some Champagne houses.
