Everything looking rosé

The quintessential summer wine is usually said to be rosé. In past times the famous ones might have come from Provence or Anjou in France. The equally well known, but perhaps less celebrated, would have included Casal Mendes and Mateus from Portugal, as well as the socalled “white zinfandel” from California.

I will forgive everyone who in their early wine drinking years was turned off rosé wines by some of these cheap and vulgar offerings. (I include myself in that list. I haven’t tried these labels lately, though.) But if you haven’t tried a rosé wine in a decade or more, you may not realize that something has been happening.

There are two major trends in the consumption of wines. One of them is the interest in sparkling wines, and the other is the rapid growth of markets for rosé wines. Everyone is putting out sparklers and pinks!

A crush of such wines might mean that quality does not matter, and to a degree, that is true. For the producers who don’t want to damage the reputation of their other labels, however, their wines are worth tasting.

In fact, there is nothing at all wrong with the idea of rosé wine — it fills a particular niche perfectly and should be enjoyed for what it is.

There are three principle methods of producing rosé wines. The obvious method, blending a red wine with a white wine to produce a pale red wine is in fact not very common (thankfully, since only the lowest reds and whites would be used for such a purpose).

The saignée method is related to the production of red wine. To increase the concentra- tion of tannins and colour in a red wine, some of the free run juice is removed early in the crushing and fermentation process.

That juice will have picked up some colour from the skin of the red grapes, and when fermented separately from the red wine, can produce a desirable beverage.

Those wine makers who start out with the intention of producing rosé, however, are able to tweak quality by using the best the grapes can produce. In this approach, the skins are left in contact with the juice to extract a little colour, and then removed immediately after crushing and before fermentation. This also reduces the amount of tannins in the wine (some of which normally would be extracted from the skins).

The best rosé wines, therefore, have some colour and quite light tannins, but the heart of a good pink is its expression of the fruit character of the grapes.

The Hardy’s Twice Lost Shiraz Cabernet Rosé 2010 (NLC $16.99) is worth considering. On the nose it shows wonderful fruit aromas of strawberry and other soft red fruits.

The aroma has a decidedly sweet and welcome fragrance. You might expect the resulting wine to be sweet, but this is a dry wine with crisp acidity. Score: 15. Rating: Very Good.

With the summer we are having, this is a great sip to have with barbecue fare such as sausages or burgers, or just on its own as a refreshing beverage on the deck.