Rosé Wine

Rosé is produced all over the world.  The archtypal drink of summer, at its best Rosé wine is light, refreshing and delicious served chilled on a sunny afternoon.  Although rose wines vary in quality like any other wine, for the most part they are produced to drink young, and are not generally aged to any extent.  After the Second World War, there was a fashion for medium-sweet rosés for mass-market consumption, the classic examples being Mateus Rosé and the American “blush” wines of the 1970's. The pendulum now seems to be swinging back towards a drier, ‘bigger’ style.  These wines are made from Rhone grapes like Syrah, Grenache and Carignan in hotter regions such as Provence, the Languedoc and Australia. In France, rosé now exceeds white wine in sales.  The term “blush” is generally restricted to wines sold in North America, although it is sometimes used in Australia and by Italian Primitivo wines hoping to cash in on the recently discovered geneticlinks between Primitivo and Zinfandel. Although “blush” originally referred to a colour (pale pink), it now tends to indicate a relatively sweet pink wine, typically with 2.5% residual sugar; in North America dry pink wines are usually marketed as rosé but sometimes as blush. In Europe almost all pink wines are referred to as rosé regardless of sugar levels, even semi-sweet ones from California.