A Very Nice Glass of Wine by Helen McGinn

Author:Helen McGinn [McGinn, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2015-04-06T21:00:00+00:00

And then there is rosé wine. Made like a white wine, treated by winemakers as a white wine, and treated by us as a joyful thing not to be taken too seriously. Which is good. And bad. The problem is, the cheap, sweet “blush” wine from California and the cheap, sweet stuff in funny-shaped bottles from Portugal has given rosé a bit of a reputation, and I’m not talking quality. In fact, rosé wines have enjoyed something of a winemaking revolution in recent years, when more of us started drinking it and wine producers started making better rosés. Think of the beautiful pale-pink rosé wines from the south of France. Or the lovely jewel-like hot pinks from the Navarra region in Spain, or from Chile or Argentina; so many good pinks to choose from!

Rosé wine is not a joke. Rather, it is a joy. It gets its color from being left in contact with the skins of the grapes for a short time (anywhere from a few hours to a few days), so obviously it needs to be made from grapes with a bit of color on the skins. Because of that skin contact, there is a little bit of tannin as well as color in the resulting wine. Some of the most delicious rosé wines around at the moment are made from the red grape Garnacha (in Spain) or Grenache (in France)—same grape, different name. Grenache is one of the grapes often used in the beautiful pale-pink rosé wines made in Provence, where half the rosé in France comes from. Drink it with a tomato salad drenched in dressing and you’ll find happiness, I swear.

There is another method of getting color into rosé, and that is bleeding, otherwise known in France, much more romantically I must say, as the saignée method. Here, a portion of red grape juice is taken after just a short period in contact with the skins, so there is just a bit of color. You can, if you want to, just add some red wine to white wine and make it pink, but by law you can’t do this in France, except in Champagne.

In summary, avoid the sweet stuff (not least because it doesn’t really taste of wine) and get aboard the pink train. Oh, the places you’ll go!

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