PINKIES
Pink is the new black. Sales of imported dry rosé wine have tripled during the past 25 years.
Pink is the new black. Sales of imported dry rosé wine have tripled during the past 25 years, according to the Conseil des Vins de Provence (CIVP). Nine of ten French wine drinkers routinely consume dry rosé with meals. Again, says the CIVP, exports of dry rosé to outside of France have increased 500 percent in 15 years’ time. In 2022, from France alone, that was 62 million bottles of dry rosé.
And like so much else in wine, we follow the French, for whom a full one-third of their wine drinking is in the pink. Their way is becoming our way because we both know how deliciously dry rosé pairs with food. Vin rosé is here to stay.
If a grape has red skin, it can make a pink wine. Dry rosés come about in one of two ways. Winemakers may macerate the red-skinned (and therefore pink-tinting) grapes in their juice for as little as an hour. Or they may bleed off (“saignée”) the juice a-pinking from a vat of red wine in the making.
We should prefer the first method, because it means the winemaker intended to make a pink wine from the get-go, rather than considered it a fortunate offshoot. But to parse that from the bottle is difficult because rosé wine labels rarely print which process was used.
Even the darkest pink wines can be made from a quick saignée, while many of the lighter rosés were made as full-on wines. A lot depends on the grapes and, nowadays, the world’s vineyards are oysters.
The Spanish favor garnacha and tempranillo; the French, grenache and cinsault. Italians use sangiovese; the Argentines, malbec; no one kicks cabernet sauvignon out of bed.
Keats toasted that “Wine comes in at the mouth / And love comes in at the eye,” but with rosé wines, the pours are reversed. Pink wines appear, in their usually clear glass bottles, in hues from the palest copper or coral to carmines nearly fire engine red. But make you no nevermind about a pink wine from its color.
For example, rosés from Provence, especially those with a healthy percentage of cinsault, are a wee darker than water yet with aromas and flavors as full as any food Provençal.
Darker pinks can port to the palate the juicy flavors of candied fruits—but do not always. I remember the aromas of a dark-pink, nearly light red, 2012 Angelini Sangiovese Rosato from Italy’s Le Marche to smell exactly like a fruity white.
Merely looking at the range of dry rosés can be pleasure enough: pastel peony, hot pink, coral, peach skin, salmon, cantaloupe, grapefruit, rose petal, cheek-in-wind, raspberry—and shades of shades within those.
And the scents of dry rosés are as varied, all along a palette of banana, lemon, tangerine, grapefruit, watermelon, licorice, melon and onto most any berry or fruit imaginable: blackberry, cherry, strawberry, cranberry, raspberry, and even, like red wine, currant and blueberry.
All of this before a sip or a savor. What appeal.