Why everyone’s talking about drinking... Rosé

Rosé? Don’t mind if I do!

YOU won’t be drinking alone. Sales at Waitrose last week were up 400 per cent year on year in anticipation of a sunny Bank Holiday weekend.

Isn’t it a bit… well, naff?

IT USED to have a stigma, dismissed as a frivolous wine, sickly sweet and poor quality. Newspaper editor John Junor expressed a different prejudice when he claimed ‘only pooves drink rosé’, but that didn’t bother wrestler Andre The Giant, who’d glug six bottles before matches, rock god Jimi Hendrix, who was famously pictured swigging it from the bottle, or Saddam Hussein, who had stockpiles in his palaces. An unblushing Jeremy Clarkson likes rosé… although he calls it ‘lady petrol’.

So women mainly drink the pink stuff?

IN THE UK, yes, including the Queen, who was so unimpressed with the wine choice in The Savoy in the 1960s that she sent out for a bottle of Mateus rosé. But there’s no gender bias in most countries, and in Brazil, men drink it most.

What is rosé and where did it come from?

THERE’S no such thing as rosé, according to EU regulations, which class wine as only white or ‘other’.

But many of the first wines ever created were rosés – blends of white and red grapes, made paler by dilution, as ancient Greeks believed only barbarians drank pure wine. Now rosés are made by either having limited contact between red grape skins and their juice before pressing, or using the juice that winemakers bleed off when making red wines a richer colour. Two Portuguese winemakers, Lancers and Mateus (whose distinctive bottle shapes were inspired by soldiers’ flasks from the First World War), popularised rosé in Europe from the 1940s.

But is the current boom just a passing trend?

IN FRANCE, sales haven’t stopped rising since 1990 and rosé is now almost a third of the wine market. British sales are less rosy but are on the up. Reasons include improvements in quality and celebrity endorsement. Before their marriage went flat, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie launched the big-selling Miraval (£16 at Sainsbury’s), while this month alone, actress Sarah Jessica Parker, rapper Post Malone and designers Dolce & Gabbana all marketed their own rosés. Häagen-Dazs make a rosé ice cream; and at least three California firms sell cannabis-infused pink wines.

A rosé by any other name… Indeed.