Looking at wine through rosé-colored glasses

Jon Bonné Lifestyle editor • Profile

Rosé is a quandary in a bottle.

Until the past year or so, the pitch went like this: dry rosé wines are perennially overlooked also-rans, wonderful but misunderstood. Now there are whispers of a countervailing theory: that rosé has been overexposed, never proving its worth in the glass.

Are we witnessing a rosé backlash? Sales for so-called blush wines are tepid, which could be a move away from the pink stuff to dry reds and whites. For many of us, pink-colored wine conjures up memories of simple, clunky, sweet wines — our first bottles, drunk before we knew better.

So it’s no wonder rosé still has trouble making its case. Wine magazines put pinot noir and chardonnay in bold type; rosé never gets to be the cover girl. Rare is the drinker who walks into a wine shop with rosé on the brain.

Yet you can’t say rosé hasn’t gotten its due. Retailers tout it with vigor. The summer rosé column — which, if you hadn’t guessed, is precisely what this is — is now a well-beaten wine-writer cliché. In our quest for the new, whatever exoticism rosé once had has since evaporated. Why visit London when Chiang Mai awaits? Why uncork a Tavel rosé from Provence when you can impress your friends with ribolla gialla from Slovenia?

The answer, of course, is that people still like London and people still like rosé — and thank goodness for taste being in the mouth of the beholder. But that rosé drum beat, which emboldened many vintners to add a dry pink to their roster, has grown repetitive. Quite honestly, not every winemaker is cut out for rosé.

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Most often, dry pink wines are byproducts of red winemaking. Vintners who want a more concentrated color — and flavor — in their reds bleed some liquid off newly crushed grape must. The pale bled-off juice is fermented into rosé. This isn’t the only way to make rosé, but as American wineries refine their techniques, it’s becoming increasingly common.

These saignée wines, as they’re often called, can be wonderful, but they share the same charms and faults as their parent juice. Overripe grapes that make highly alcoholic red wines will also produce heavy-hitting rosés. It’s no longer uncommon to see rosé at 14 percent alcohol and beyond, specimens that are usually overpowering, even uncomfortable in the glass.

Ideally, a good dry rosé is a creature unto itself, combining the red-fruit flavors and a bit of the tannic grip of red wine with the vibrancy of a light white wine. That’s why they’re so great with food. With that in mind, we tasted 60 rosés from around the globe to find ones that will best complement lighter summer fare. While a handful showed promise, many were quite ho-hum. A few were barely drinkable.

Searching for winners
France has perhaps the most famous rosé legacy — wines from appellations like Bandol and Tavel have stellar reputations and price tags to match — but most Provence wines we sampled didn’t dazzle as much as their relations from the Rhone and Loire Valleys. Our $20 price cap might have ruled out the most renowned French rosés, but honestly, there’s no reason to spend more than that on even a stellar pink wine.

Other frequently strong contenders struggled to shine. Spanish rosés, usually mouthwatering, failed to come through this year. Italy’s results were similarly mixed.

Keep an eye out for rosé made from pinot noir. Rosé is most often crafted from robust varieties, either from the Bordeaux (cabernet, merlot) or Rhone (grenache, syrah) portfolios, strong grapes that invoke bold flavors. But pinot rosé can be more subtle: the light strawberry and floral scents typical of that grape, with the bright-eyed acidity that helps heighten food’s flavors. Yet even here, the quality varied widely from winery to winery.

And that, finally, is the frustration: Regardless of whether rosé is unloved or over hyped, the risks of selling a mediocre bottle to a curious drinker are high. Winemakers might want to keep that in mind before they think pink.

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