APRIL 2020 – Rosé

Rosé Ceremony

Rosé is best drunk upon release and for around a year. While many rosé wines can last two years and sometimes more they show best when young. My advice is to sell through all 2017 and 2018 vintage stock by July in readiness for the 2019 releases.

Summer is now transitioning into Autumn rather quickly, but gosh haven’t we had a great season with some fantastic weather! More opportunities to dine later in the day and outside as well. What have people been drinking the most? Rosé. Why? Because it’s simple, easy to drink, goes with practically any cuisine style and most of all – a reliable and affordable choice – for most.  

While the price of rosé has increased slightly, the choices and quality have increased as well. There are more local producers of rosé than ever before and with imports of rosé steady there is still plenty of choice available. Statistics show a steady increase in production with over 20 million hectolitres of Rosé produced annually around the globe. Rosé is not a complicated wine to make or drink. Apart from being a lightly coloured wine it should also be crisp in texture and have an obvious fruity quality. All colours of rosé are acceptable though the trend recently has been towards the onion skin/salmon/pale apricot hues.

Rosé can be produced from any red grape variety including Pinot Noir (the most popular in NZ), Merlot, Tempranillo, Syrah, Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc among the more widely used. 

Wineries that specifically produce red wine have the option to change the juice to skin ratio allowing winemakers to produce a darker coloured wine. To achieve this they must remove some juice. This process is called Saignée, a French term meaning ‘bleed’. The juice that is ‘bled’ away 12–24 hours post skin contact is used to make rosé.

The second method is when no bleeding happens with the intended outcome of 100% of the juice is a Rosé wine. Twelve to twenty-four hours skin contact still required.