Where in the world is more pink wine consumed than any place but Provence? You guessed it: Long Island’s East End.
The love affair with rosé that began with Peter Mayle’s 1989 best-selling novel, “A Year in Provence,” has grown so that now the rosé romance has spread to other summer vacation destinations, especially our own.
Until the 1990s, Provence produced mostly coarse, red vins de table, but the increased demand for rosés has changed the balance. Almost 90 percent of the wines produced there are pink. For Long Island’s vintners, it has taken a few years for the trend to catch on. Over the past decade, our wineries are producing more rosé in a wider range of styles than ever before. This increase is driven, according Wölffer Estate Vineyard’s winemaker Roman Roth, by “improved [fruit] quality, the locavore movement, the big shift that lower alcohol wine is better than the big heavy fruit bombs. It has become the perfect scenario for our wonderful Long Island wines.”
As Paumanok Vineyards founder Charles Massoud pointed out, “Rosé is another catchall name that has the only common attribute of some shade of rose to light red color. It is not a varietal driven wine and there are many methods to produce one.”
This intrinsic flexibility suits our winemakers well, especially as a cost-effective alternative adaptation of red grapes. “We make our rosés exclusively from red grapes,” Mr. Massoud said of the Aquebogue-based winery. “We leave the crushed berries in the tank for a few hours to extract the water-soluble color pigments and then press the grapes and go on fermenting them as a white wine.”
By altering the length of maceration time and the final sweetness of the resulting wines, Paumanok makes two distinctive versions of rosé: both dry and “blush,” which is distinctly sweet.
Wölffer Estate in Sagaponack also produces diverse rosés to suit consumer preferences. Following last year’s sell-out success of their signature dry rosé, Wölffer added two more: a softer, more overtly aromatic “Summer in a Bottle” rosé styled from slightly riper fruit, plus an intricately complex, barrel-fermented “White Horse Grandioso Rosé.”
Unlike the Paumanok rosés, Wölffer’s are made from blends of several grape varieties, including merlot, gewürztraminer, chardonnay and cabernet franc, sourced from seven vineyards. This radically alters the way the wines are made, since Mr. Roth ferments the varieties separately, then blends them into batches awaiting a final blend before bottling. He wants his wines dry, but not bitter. “The key is to work as gentle with the fruit as possible,” he said. “No skin contact or maceration, great settling of the lees.”
At the Lenz Winery in Peconic, manager Tom Morgan said he is leery of how the market for rosés has trended. “The key to success is too often a degree of sweetness combined with elaborate, eye catching packaging,” he said, “and all too cute proprietary names.”
Equally averse to trends, Lenz’s quintessentially contrarian winemaker Eric Fry makes a bone-dry rosé that drinks like a still champagne because it is made from the pinot noir picked for the Lenz Cuvée sparkling wine. I guess there are plenty of consumers who agree with Mr. Morgan and Mr. Fry, considering the Lenz Blanc de Noir always sells out by summer’s end.
As readers must know by now, my personal preference is also for wines, including rosés, made without residual sugar. I like them radically dry to reveal the essence of the original fruit. For a recent blind tasting of several Long Island rosés—all of them supplied by the wineries that made them—I shared the samples with a small group of friends to allow for a broader range of preferences. Happily for me, most of the wines we sampled were quite dry. Here are our notes, in alphabetical order:
Bridge Lane Rosé: austere, refreshing, with lingering black cherry aromas
Lieb Sparkling Rosé: wonderfully quaffable, slightly yeasty gushers of bubbles; we drank it before we could elaborate on its virtues
Macari Rosé: svelte, harmonious, easy drinking
Paumanok Rosé, two styles: “Dry,” with lovely fruit aroma, gorgeous color; “Blush,” sweet, like drinking strawberry juice, boldly appealing
Pellegrini Rosé, full disclosure, my son, Zander, is the winemaker: mouthfuls of luscious fruit, round and full
Pindar Dry Rosé: a group pleaser, fresh and vibrant, with delicate aromas
Roanoke Rosé, two styles: “Dry,” beautifully balanced, silky; “Unfiltered,” with funky aromas, wild and wooly for a pink wine
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