When pink is perfect

There might not be much in a name, but ardent lovers of rosé champagne know well that few things smell so sweet. (But not in a sugary sense, rosé is typically just as dry as its blonde sibling!)

Rosé champagne goes way back, with the earliest records of its existence found at Champagne Ruinart from 1764. As with many of history’s eureka moments, the invention may have been a complete accident; current Ruinart chef de cave Frédéric Panaïotis noting, "Maybe some guy didn't wake up in the morning, or they were short-staffed, so there was extra skin contact."

From these early documents it is believed that the first salmon sparklers must have been made via the saignée method. This means that the base wines were allowed contact with the skins of black grapes, with the colour bleeding into the juice. This method persists today, but is less common, due largely to the difficulties in extracting consistency in colour and flavour profile following the second ferment mandatory to champagne.

Further innovation followed in 1818. Madame Barbe-Nicole Clicquot was apparently unsatisfied by the taste produced by the saignée method, so she instead took the more direct measure of simply mixing red and white wines together to obtain a pink-coloured result.

This exercise in colour theory was a success, and survives as the dominant means of production. Curiously, Champagne is the only region in the EU allowed to make rosé wine in this fashion.