Oxford Companion to Wine
Rosé

Eric Asimov, in his NYTimes’ wine blog “The Pour” tells us this week that “Rosé has been the darling of summertime wine drinkers…” He continues to talk about sparkling Rosés. Sure, we believe Asimov that sparkling Rosés are cool. But what is Rosé? A shade of red? White wine with a splash of red? We looked in our handy Oxford Companion to Wine to find out.

rosé wines, suddenly popular wines in any shade of pink, from hardly perceptible to pale red. For some reason they are rarely known as pink wines, although the English word Blush has been adopted for particularly pale rosés. There was also a fashion in California, from the late 1980’s when wine had to be white to be popular, to label pale pink wines made from dark-skinned grapes White, as in White Zinfandel (which has spawned a host of supposedly White wines made from such darkly colored grape varieties as Cabernet, Merlot, Grenache, and Barbera).

In France, rosés are particularly common in warmer, southern regions where there is local demand for a dry wine refreshing enough to be drunk on a hot summer’s day but which still bears some relation to the red wine so revered by the French. Provence is the region most famous for its rosé, often in a strange skittle-shaped bottle, although, in the greater southern Rhône (especially Tavel), the Languedoc, and Roussillon, roses are at least as common as white wines. Grenache and Cinsaut are two of the grapes commonly used for rose in the south of France. The Loire valley also produces a high proportion of extremely lovely Anjou, whether lowbrow Rosé d’Anjou or highbrow Cabernet D’Anjou. See also Rose De Loiré, Vin Gris, and Saignée are all French terms for particular types of rosé.

Spain also takes pink wines seriously – so seriously that it has at least two names for them, depending on the intensity of the color. A Rosado is light pink, while darker pink (light red) wines are labeled Clarete. Portugal’s best-known pink wines are exported, as in Mateus and Lancers. Pink wines are not especially popular in Italy, where the term used is usually rosato although chiaretto, meaning ‘claret’ is occasionally used for darker roses. It is only with difficulty that German grapes can be persuaded to yield wines that can genuinely be called red rather than rose. Official German terms for pink wines included Weissherbst and in, Württemberg, Schillerwein. See also eil de Perdrix.

The New World was for long rather bemused by the concept of rose, although this change fast in the early 21st century. Chile was innovative. Australia makes some swashbuckling deep pinks and South Africa has a growing market, with several of the winesbranded Blanc de Noir (sic) to indicate they are produced solely from red grapes.

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