Ireland is engaged in a love affair with rosé

Ihave a theory that one of the reasons why we Irish have embraced wine with such enthusiasm in recent years is that we don’t really see enough sunshine on this little island. We pay a price for having a minimum of forty shades of green. There’s nothing quite as lovely as a cloudless sky in Ireland and such weather brings out the rosé enthusiasts among us.

And what’s not to like, as they say? The wines are pretty, most of them are versatile with food, they don’t, as a rule, assault the senses, and most of them weigh in at a reasonable price. Of late there has been a vogue for pinks that are as serious as pinks get — which is not very, in my view — and you can spend €25 and upwards if you really want to. The quality will be impressive but you might like to compare one of them with one the wines that I’m recommending this week. In some cases, the difference will be slight.

Most rosés are made by allowing the skins of black grapes remain in contact with the juice for long enough to extract some colour. Generally, this is pretty brief but sometimes a bit of tannin is extracted too, which can add a degree of complexity to an otherwise very straightforward wine.

These days, an increasing number of rosés are made by adding a little red wine to white wine, which is what most Champagne houses have been doing since pink Champagne was invented (the most famous exception being Laurent-Perrier). New Zealand has been making pink Sauvignon Blanc for several years, a style of wine that doesn’t quite float my boat as I just find it confusing. However, Aldi’s pink Chardonnay from Hungary is an absolute cracker and it suggests to me that Chardonnay is a more suitable grape for this kind of treatment than the pungent Sauvignon.

One of the great advantages of a good rosé is versatility. It will be as at home with grilled fish as it is with a pork chop, with a crab salad as with spaghetti carbonara.

We certainly like the stuff, having doubled our consumption since 2016, and retailers are offering more and more rosés. O’Brien’s have a sale right now (look out for wine buyer Lynne Coyle MW’s delicious Rós which she makes in Navarra) and Aldi have included lots of pinks in its summer selection.