Some days it feels like rosé is still new and trendy, like we’re still exploring what’s possible. To be fair, skin contact wines from both red and white grapes (orange wines) are the oldest of wines styles, millennia old, since modern concepts like cold-soak maceration for extraction of color (for reds) and temperature-controlled fermentations (for whites) are innovations of the mid-20th century. Technical details aside, what is old feels new again and both have a wide range of expressions that sometimes defy their own category. But we’ll try to contain them as best we can. 

There’s a rainbow of techniques for rosé, but in my opinion, these can be narrowed to three main styles: 1. Rosé from a single variety, 2. Rosé from blending, and 3. Historical styles specific to a region. As the store’s wine buyer, I stay aware of these three but they by no means limit what I’m looking for. The wine has to deliver good quality for a good price, first and foremost, and only then will I nerd out about it being a good example of a Cerasuolo from Italy or an off-dry style from the Loire. 

For our first category, we’ll look at rosés from a single variety. The basic requirement for this is a red grape with a reasonable amount of acid (for freshness). Technically you can make a rosé from any red variety, but some are poorly suited for it (though that never stops someone from trying). Bold reds like Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec take too long to ripen, and while rosés are made from “underripe” grapes to preserve acid -- grapes lose acid as they gain sugar/ripeness – these grapes have very little to start with and just don’t work, in my opinion; they’re flabby and boring. But then there’s Grenache, the quintessential rosé grape of warm southern France, which also is not known for high acid when made into a red wine, yet has enough of it when barely ripe to make delicious rosés. Other single-variety stars are Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc, Cinsault, Carignan, Gamay, and Barbera. Grenache rosés lean to raspberry flavors, Pinot to cherry, and Barbera and Cinsault to underripe red berries with an herbal lilt. Arguably the most famous single-variety rosé of recent history, (White) Zinfandel, initiated the rosé renaissance in the 1980s. However, it falls into the low-acid category in all but the most unique (and delicious) examples, which is why this variety that gets very (very) ripe did well as a style that left some of that ripeness unfermented as sugar. Sweeter rosés had been around before (we’ll talk about one below), but the sweet pink wine that still prompts many rosé shoppers to exclaim “but not too sweet!” became a category all to itself. In the store, the sweeter rosés are separated from the dry examples to avoid confusion.

Some favorite single-variety rosés in the store right now are the rosé of Grenache from Cruess Wines in Sonoma, the Pinot Noir rosé from Pike Road from Willamette Valley, Ashes & Diamonds rosé of Cabernet Franc from Napa Valley, and the Ioppa rosé of Nebbiolo from Piedmont in Italy. And if you want to walk on the wild side, our other Nebbiolo rosé comes from Mexico’s Baja California and the winery of Dominio de la Abejas. Delicious and unique. 

The second style is blended rosés. Winemaking is the art of blending, so this isn’t unusual, and blended rosés generally have a more rounded profile, with a combination of wines and grapes complimenting each other in ways that might not be possible by one grape alone. The most famous region known for blending their rosés is Champagne, where you can either make a white wine and then add a splash of red before bottling, make red and white wines and blend them before aging and second fermentation, or make a rosé and then age that for second fermentation. Each yields a different profile: adding red wine at the end is fuller-bodied and fruitier; blending white and red before second fermentation is most common so the wines can integrate themselves; aging a rosé is preferred and making the rosé with a style of pressing called saignée creates a dark, robust sparkling wine that, in my opinion, is one of the few styles of Champagne that can work with cuts of meat. Blending is common in Prosecco, Cava and many other parts of the world, but regions like Alsace (Crémant d’Alsace) require aging of single-variety rosé wines for sparkling; Crémant d’Alsace Rosé must be 100% Pinot Noir. 

Some excellent examples of rosé blends are the ever-popular GD Vajra Rosabella Rosé from Piedmont, Kind Stranger from the Columbia Valley of Washington, and the Real Housewives’ favorite Whispering Angel from Provencel, which is one of the few still rosés we carry that combines both red and white wines. 

The third style of rosé is what I consider historical styles, meaning they are specific and traditional to a particular region. One of the more well-known of these is Tavel, a region across the river from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, that only makes rosé wines. The most traditional examples use all eighteen authorized grapes for use in the area and creates a darker, fuller-bodied rosé. In Italy, the unique Cerasuolo (pronounced chair-uh-SWAY-low) derives from the Latin “cherry” because that’s the color of the wine; it’s practically a light red and carries a fruity profile to match. Another example is Cabernet d’Anjou, which is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc from a region of France’s Loire Valley of the same name. This wine must be off-dry/slightly sweet and our bottle of this, from Maison Lebrun, is in the store specifically because it’s a nerdy exception to the dry rosés of the Loire. The counterpoint to this is the newly-arrived Reuilly vin gris, which is a rosé style made from the pink-skinned Pinot Gris, also from the Loire and famous/classic from that region. The Reuilly lives in the French section, however, and not the rosé section, because of reasons no one really cares about except me regarding production technique (vin gris is technically an orange wine and not a rosé, even though both styles are two sides of the same skin-contact coin). 

For these wines, you can try the Chateau d’Aqueria Tavel, the Tiberio Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo, or the mentioned Lebrun Cabernet d’Anjou. Or the Domaine Reuilly vin gris, also.