Rosado Rules

Any wine lover knows there are certain unwritten rules about wine that revolve around its colour. We all know the basic ones: red with meat, white with fish, red at cellar temperature, white from the fridge or ice bucket, etc. But where does rosé fit into the scheme of things?

WORDS ANDREW J LINN

Clearly the most pervasive negative is that rosé is not for real men and is best left to the fairer sex. When rosé finally became an established universal drink, men who drank it were referred to as brosé (Bros’ rosé – geddit?)

Another myth is that it is never a serious accompaniment to food, being neither fish nor fowl in the vinous sense, and can only be acceptable as a lighthearted aperitif. In its most simplistic guise, most of us assume that, if white wine comes from white grapes and red from red grapes, rosé must be a mix of both. Wrong. 75 per cent of wine of any shade comes from red grapes, and since man started crushing grapes all wine was rosé, or to be totally accurate, orange. Why does colour matter when colour is not reflected in the taste? The colour of red wine is provided by the skins and can be adjusted by the length of time the freshly pressed must is left in contact with them. Here we arrive at a somewhat conflictive area, as it has been proved systematically in rigidly controlled tastings that experts, winemakers and sommeliers are unable to tell the difference by taste alone. Impossible? Just try it. Get someone to pour a glass of each and then do a blind tasting. In the highly unlikely event that you can identify

the colour of the wine correctly by taste, you are in the tiny minority of people capable of doing this, and it will more likely to be down to serendipity than any other factor. The dark red wines as we know them today were not popular until well into the last century, and the bulk of wine that used to be consumed had more of a rosé tone than a red one. When the clarets from Bordeaux started to become popular in overseas markets, notably the English one, it was the type referred to as ‘d’une nuit’ or ‘one night wine’ that was most accepted. The brief 12hour skin contact was sufficient to produce the desired reddish tinge. Uniquely in the history of our favourite tipple, a couple of commercial brands changed the entire way Europeans and North Americans looked at rosé wine. Two Portuguese winemaking families independently launched the Mateus Rosé and Lancers brands that were to dominate the low-cost market for the ensuing half century. Although white wine is accepted as being made from white grapes, this is only true to a degree. During the last half of the 20th century in the USA, there were not enough white grapes to satisfy demand so many Californian producers turned to using red grapes with minimal skin contact instead. Rosé wines are therefore to some extent those whose development is not permitted to run its normal course and is in some way inhibited. It is all about the length of time the must is allowed to stay in contact with the grape skins and stalks. There are several varieties of rosé wine, starting with what is generally regarded as the original Provence version.

One of the reasons why rosés have a very limited shelf-life is because of their low phenolic levels. Within a year of production the level of 3-mercaptohexanol1-ol in the wine has usually dropped to half its fermentation level, which is why most rosés are consumed as soon after release as possible. I was the first importer of Spanish rosado wines into the UK back in the 1960s, and it must be admitted that the challenge was more difficult than originally anticipated. The classical rosados come from the Navarra region, and the Las Campanas winery produced the best, but sales were slow, and a very conservative public could not focus outside French borders on such a product. It has taken half a century, but currently Spain’s rosado wines are generally considered superior to many others, although of course other winemaking countries like Italy, Argentina, Chile, New Zealand and South Africa have some outstanding also-rans. Rosados are often confused with claretes, a common term for young reds from the north of Spain, but they are in quite different categories. e

REAL

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