Twenty years ago, rosé wines had no stature. For the generation that began drinking wine in the 1960s and early ’70s, fizzy, sweet pink Portuguese rosés were “starter” wines, a first baby step into what were considered “real” wines—the dry, tannic wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy.
The popularity of Lancers and Mateus retreated as a new generation learned to see, swirl, and sip bigger and redder wines.
In 1975, when the Sutter Home winery in Napa inadvertently found themselves with a stuck fermentation that yielded a sweet pink wine in a batch of (normally red) Zinfandel, they had a stroke of genius. By calling it “white” Zinfandel, they literally and figuratively avoided the taint of “rosé.”
This brought a new group of wine drinkers into the market, a group that consisted mostly of women who switched from whiskey sours to white Zin until they learned to say, “I’ll have a glass of Chardonnay.”
The crazy success of Peter Mayle’s hilarious book, “A Year in Provence,” drew a few wine lovers to appreciate the dry rosés of southern France, but mostly as casual wines for le pique nique.
In the ’90s, Jeff Morgan, a saxophone player who learned to make wine from Larry Perrine at the old Gristina Vineyards in Cutchogue and then moved to the West Coast to write about wine for The Wine Spectator, returned to winemaking with a mission: to popularize high quality dry rosé. With his many contacts in the wine business, he gathered a high wattage group of international winemakers and hit the road to proselytize rosé under the team name “Rosé Avengers.”
It took a while, but the Avengers fought fiercely for the wine critics’ and wine buyers’ attention. In case you haven’t noticed, it is now not just acceptable, but chic, to serve rosé. Morgan’s own “Solorosa” (only rosé) wines, made in an assertive Napa style, have garnered high marks.
One of the purest, most thrilling iterations of rosé comes from Champagne, with bubbles. It makes sense that the Champenois would use their red grapes, pinot noir and pinot meunier, to make a pink wine, because in their northern climate these grapes don’t ripen well enough to compete with their red siblings in Burgundy, farther south.
While blanc de blanc champagne is made from chardonnay, and most brut is a blend of the three Champagne grapes, the rosé is predominantly pinot. This gives it a supple, more tactile mouth feel, and is also more phenolic or astringent, due to the extraction of tannin from the dark skins of pinot noir. Rosé de Champagne is more expensive than brut, and more suitable as a food wine.
A good popular example is the Nicolas Feuillate; the Veuve Cliquot Rosé is also a favorite of sommeliers who are tired of the more ubiquitous “yellow label” brut.
From the East End, the Lenz Winery’s “Cuvée” is an elegant bubbly wine that (as of the 2003 vintage) is now entirely made from pinot noir. Lenz winemaker Eric Fry also makes an accessory still wine, a “blanc de noir” blush, that is one of my favorite Long Island rosés.
Delicate and extremely dry, this is a rosé for non-rosé drinkers.
Pugliese and The Old Field also make delightful sparkling wines from the black pinot noir grape.
Another winemaking trend, the saignée process, has prompted more wineries worldwide to make and promote premium dry rosés. As highly extracted red wines have garnered the critics’ highest ratings, winemakers now commonly bleed off about 10 percent of the juice intended for red wine. By increasing the ratio of skins to liquid, the red wines then become deeper in color. The juice that has been bled off, or saignée, is pale pink in color, and perfect for rosé.
Rosé wines were historically disparaged in part because most were made from the blended, sweetened, red and white dregs of the cellar. But the fresh saignée wines, and many wines made from early pressings of red grapes like merlot (e.g., the multiple rosés of Croteaux Vineyards) are made on purpose.
With the new popularity of dry rosé, winemakers can afford to take the style seriously. Wölffer Estate has built a huge following for its popular dry rosé, and the Channing Daughters rosés are so popular, winemaker Chris Tracy now makes at least three distinctive pink wines from various grapes and grape blends. The Channing “Rosato di Cabernet Franc” from the 2009 vintage—that’s from grapes picked last fall—is already sold out.
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