Beyond its sheer drinking delight, rosé wines’ most attractive feature is it being a style free from the burdensome baggage of expectation. The pink stuff comes to the table with the sole purpose of providing enjoyment, zingy taste and refreshing pleasure. Unlike Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and Pinot Noir, the appearance of a glass of rosé before of a group of wine connoisseurs does not lead to intense conversation and fervent debate on aromatic nuance, palate-presence or lingering aftertaste.
With rosé, it’s simply a case of “cheers, down-the-hatch,” a wine to be knocked-back without pretence, the reason humankind began making wine 8 000 years ago. The only noticeable distinction in the range of rosé wines is between sweet and dry. Four or five decades back, when global wine tastes leaned towards sweeter wines, semi-sweet rosé was the in-thing. The market, including here in South Africa, was led by demand for massive brands like Portugal’s Mateus rosé, which annually sold nearly as many bottles worldwide as what the Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo currently earns in dollars per month.
However, dry rosé began to dominate over time, not only due to the public’s overall shift away from sweet wines, but also because of rosé’s association with its place of origin, namely Provence in southern France. Wine has always been associated with the tasteful, cultivated French lifestyle. And with the international marketing of Provence since the 1980s as a place of lavender fields, olive trees, sea, and sun where beautiful people devour bowls of bouillabaisse on yachts while swigging rosé wine, that country’s style of dry rosé started to dominate the market for the pink wine.
Provence’s penchant for rosé is, like most French things, tied to a colourful history. Marseille, the capital of Provence and the oldest city in France, was established about 2 600 years ago by adventurous explorers from the west of Greece who reportedly planted their own vineyards in the area. The all-conquering Romans invaded Marseille in 200 BC and began taking over the place, discovering that, indeed, the early settlers’ wines had a distinctive light, pinkish hue, far removed from the purplish-black-red wines or yellow white wines the Romans were accustomed to.
Even them Romans knew not to tamper with a winning recipe, and Provence remains to this day the home of rosé wine as well as being the region that inspires makers of this wine style around the world. Although rosé’s greatest virtues are its unpretentious accessibility, it is the only wine type judged by its cloak, literally. And that is colour. Neither red nor white, what is important in the rosé diaspora is the shading of that colour boundary in between.
In France, the lighter the colour, the more desirable the rosé. Garish inner-thigh pink and sunset orange are considered inelegant; a good rosé should have just the slightest hint of onion skin or light shade of salmon flesh. And since it’s usually sold in clear translucent bottles, the relevant producer’s rosé colour is there for all to see.
To make Provençal – or authentic – rosé, red grapes are used. Since the juice of most red grapes is white, and the skins are, well, red-purple, the key to achieving the ideal final wine colour lies in the contact the juice has with the skins during the pressing process. Too long and the colour is a slutty shade of pink; too short and it’s insipidly non-descript. And a correct touch of skin contact with the red grapes is needed to give the rosé that hint of red, berry fruit that makes the final wine’s flavour profile so attractive.
However, it involves more than just the correct period of skin contact, says Heinrich van der Watt, winemaker at Pink Valley Wines in the Helderberg, Stellenbosch. As the winemaker of South Africa’s only winery exclusively focused on making rosé, he had to learn from the French and, specifically from the cellar Domaine Vallon des Glauges located in the rosé sanctuary of Provence.
“The French’s concern with colour in the making of rosé is understandable because in Provence, rosé is by far the most popular wine, and consumers consider colour just as important as taste and mouthfeel,” says Heinrich, who this year completed his first harvest as Pink Valley’s official winemaker.
“The rosé should just show a shade of the red grapes it’s made from. As South African winemakers, we are always taught that balance is crucial to a wine’s flavour profile, but when it comes to French-style rosé, you have to engage the other senses to perfect the balance of colour.”
Colour is more about the contact between white juice and red skins. “We use the red cultivars Grenache, Syrah, and Sangiovese for Pink Valley rosé, and even when you press the grapes almost immediately after they are harvested, further steps must be taken to achieve the ideal colour we desire for the wine.”
The step that follows is the same as that at Vallon des Glauges in Provence, and it’s called cold. The pressed juice is kept at 2°C for two weeks before the fermentation process begins. Besides the fact that this cold period enriches the wine’s flavour profile, the overly dark colours effectively settle out of the juice, which – after the processes of fermentation and stabilisation – results in the desired super-light pink and onion skin hue in the final wine.
The role of lower temperature in rosé production is significant, as this is one wine that truly cannot be served too cold. In fact, no wine is more refreshing or soul-uplifting than a glass of ice-cold rosé, and it is also a wine with which one can comfortably add a cube or two of ice without receiving sideways glances from those still trapped in wine conventions.
Just drink rosé, and chill.
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