Reddish wines, the drink of the summer

“Look at the colour on that! I’m not drinking that and I’ll drink anything.”

With the sun making a glorious appearance, I’m posting something on pinkish and reddish wines. But first the usual shameless plug for the Intoxicating History podcast. We were delighted to welcome our first guest, Alice Lascelles. She’s the author of The Martini: The Ultimate Guide to a Cocktail Icon which I’d highly recommend readers buy after listening to the show. Not only is she fascinating on the history and culture of this great cocktail, but she mixed us with a lethally strong cocktail at the end. We’ve just recorded a two-parter on the wines of ancient Rome which will go out tomorrow, 19 March and the following Thursday.

Right’s let’s rosé!

“Look at the colour on that! I’m not drinking that and I’ll drink anything,” she said. The occasion was a tasting I hosted at Vino wine bar in Faversham last year. We had sampled a range of English sparkling wines which everyone seemed to love. All except this one lady who had a problem with a wine from Hundred Hills in Oxfordshire with an orange-tinged pink hue, distinctly darker than the Provence-esque norm that we have come to expect from sparkling rosé. The taste was fuller too with a red wine quality about it. I thought it was glorious but this one lady wasn’t sold and left her glass resolutely untouched.

The following week I hosted a tasting for a city law firm, again everyone was very positive until we came to the Flint Pinot Noir Précoce from Norfolk. It was a bright pink and people complained: “This isn’t how a red wine was meant to look!” The flavour, vivid cherry sherbert, didn't impress either. It didn’t taste like claret or Burgundy or whatever these high flyers normally drank. But then I asked whether people might enjoy it served cold at a garden party as you might a rosé. Everyone thought for a bit and then said, you know what, I might actually quite like it.

Don’t let the Barbie colour fool you, this is dry and meaty

It’s funny how the colour of a wine can affect how much we enjoy it. The Provence pale pink has become such the norm that some people treat anything darker with suspicion - worried perhaps that it’s going to be like Mateus Rosé (which incidentally is delicious served with ice on a hot day). Some people think the darker colour means that it’s going to be sweeter.

All over the world, rosé wines are getting lighter. Traditional dark styles are being pushed out by Provence clones. One wine merchant described it as “rosé fascism, judging wine by the colour.” Customers have certain expectations about what colour their wine should be. While dark rosés might be a hard sell, so are pale reds. English winemaking veteran Owen Elias told me that when he was at Chapel Down in warm years he made a lovely red pinot noir from Essex-grown fruit but the salesman didn’t know what to do with it. Randall Grahm experienced a similar thing trying to sell wines made from cinsault: “There's very little about cinsault that appeals to the American taste/obsession for power and concentration. Cinsault doesn't have a lot of tannin nor colour and there has never been a move made celebrating its subtle charms.”

You might be surprised to learn that this strict demarcation is quite recent. If like me you spend a lot of time watching old Keith Floyd programmes on Youtube, you’ll see that Provence rosé used to be much darker. The modern style came about in the 2000s and it’s based on a formula starting with pale skin red grapes such as cinsault and grenache picked underripe so that the skins have even less colour and often at night to maintain freshness. White grapes can be used to lighten the colour further. They are then pressed very gently like making a blanc de noirs champagne and the juice is fermented using a special yeast that gives that characteristic strawberry taste.

Just as pinks used to be redder, I suspect that most reds used to be paler before Australian shiraz and Argentine malbec became the touchstones for how wines should look. Looking at the cover of The Daily Telegraph Guide to the Pleasures of Wine by Denis Morris published in 1972, the red wine glinting in a beautiful cut crystal goblet is, well, red, rather than purple or black.

Heading even further in the past, according to Hugh Johnson in his Story of Wine, 14th century claret was “a very light red or rosé”. It had more in common with a Beaujolais Nouveau than a broad-shouldered modern Bordeaux. When Gascony was under English rule it was drunk in heroic quantities. It’s estimated that something like 50 million bottles of wine would be shipped from Bordeaux to England every year at a time when the population of this country was around 5 million.

There are still some producers in Bordeaux making a pale-coloured red called ‘clairet’,

though whether it’s anything like what would have been drunk before the Hundred Years War is anyone’s guess. There are other genre-bending wines like Tavel which AJ Liebling writing in the New Yorker in the 1930s described like this: “the taste is warm but dry, like an enthusiasm held under restraint, and there is a tantalizing suspicion of bitterness when the wine hits the top of the palate.” It’s a pink that with its tannic bite, functions more like a red. At a recent Berry Bros tasting there was a Cerasuolo di Vittoria Rosato which was darker and meatier than the Danbury Ridge Pinot Noir from England. Both were excellent, did it matter that one was technically a pink and the other a red?

This might be a hard one for the marketing department to get its head around yet the success of orange wine shows that genre-busting bottles can break through into the mainstream. Who knows maybe reddish wines will be next year’s drink of the summer?

Here are some pink and reddish wines I’ve enjoyed recently:

Señorío de Sarría Garnacha Navarra Rosado 2023 (£11.95)

I used to drink Spanish rosado by the gallon in my 20s but it wasn’t as good as this with its deep colour and flavour of big crunchy red cherries. Huge fun and an absolute steal.

Château Ksara Sunset 2023 (£16.74)

This isn’t quite the Barbie pink colour it was last year but it’s still brighter than most. Taste wise, it’s surprisingly meaty, made with 60% cab franc with the rest syrah. Hard to imagine a dish that wouldn't be great with this.

Quinta da Pedra Alta Douro Pedra A Pedra Clarete 2022 (£17.50)

Deep coloured Portuguese pink made with a mixture of red and white grapes. Red fruit, fresh with a little tannin here and only 11.5%.

Cantina Zaccagnini Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo Il Vino dal Tralcetto 2023 (19.49)

Traditional Italian style of pink with tannins and everything plus a cherry pit nuttiness on the finish. Great stuff whatever the weather.

Gutter & Stars Pinot Noir The Dark End of the Street 2023 (£33)

Closer to a rose than a red in colour but no shortage of flavour in this Essex Burgundy, think ripe red fruit and a creamy texture.