Sunday Drinking: 7 May
This week I’m dreaming of rosé wines with a bit of colour from England and Spain.
You may not have noticed it but rosé wines have been getting lighter and lighter in recent years. I was in Greece a few years ago with winemaker Yiannis Paraskevopoulos from Gaia Estate which produces two roses one light and one dark. He was raging against the trend for pale wines: “sales of dark rosé are plunging, salesman keeping asking me for lighter wines”, he said.
Everyone is aping the Provencal style like Miraval or Whispering Angel. You might be surprised to learn that these almost colourless wines are new. Looking back at the Provence episode of Floyd Uncorked from the late 1990s where the great chef pretends to be interested in the intricacies of grape varieties and terroir when he really just wants to drink the stuff and you’ll see that the wine is a ripe strawberry colour. It’s really only in the last 10-15 years that the wines have become incredibly pale. And they’re getting paler.
There’s a formula for making such wines. You start with lighter-skinned red grapes such as cinsault and grenache, picked underripe so that the skins have even less colour. White grapes can be used to lighten the blend 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. Far from being the traditional wines of the region, these are moden technology wines. There’s nothing wrong with that, and the very best can be wonderful with a weight and complexity that belies their lack of colour.
This move towards lightness might be a reaction to sweet wines such as zinfandel blush or Mateus rosé. Whatever the reason, pale now equals sophistication. Steve Daniel, who has been importing Greek wine to England for 20 years, calls it “rosé fascism, judging wine by the colour.” Countries such as Spain, Italy and Greece with proud darker rosé traditions are making paler wines. Though some are very good indeed, I’m just not sure that the Provence technique works in everywhere. Grenache, the basis of most Southern French and Spanish roses, is a high alcohol grape with a certain fatness to it - if you pick it early in the heat of the south, you’re still going to get lots of flavour. With other grapes and in other countries you can get grassy underripe tasting wines.
A lot of producers in England are now trying to make Provence-style wines with varying degrees of success. Gusbourne has gone all out with a new Provence-look bottle. I am sure the latest vintage will be very nice but I can’t help thinking longingly of the gorgeous cherry-coloured pinot noir rose the winemaker Charlie Holland made in 2020.
So I was delighted when Chris Wilson from Gutter & Stars told me about a rosé he had made and offered to send me sample. He works from a basement under an old windmill in Cambridge buying in grapes from around southern and eastern England. His latest wine is called Rage Against the Dying of the Light (a nod to Dylan Thomas not Rage Against the Machine) and it’s a blend of bacchus and pinot noir. He describers it as: ‘an experimental wine in every sense, it was made up bringing together two live fermentations; Bacchus grown at Yew Tree Vineyard in Oxfordshire and Pinot Noir from Brenley Farm in Kent. The wine completed fermentation in barrel, where it matured for almost five months before bottling.'
Bacchus and pinot noir might seem like a recipe for a dog’s dinner but this is the bees knees. Wilson has managed to avoid the vegetal notes commonly found in bacchus and combined with pinot noir it’s redolent of pink grapefruit combined with red cherries. It looks as good as it tastes too, a beautiful raspberry colour. I love that it’s not trying to copy the style of wines from warmer climates. I drank it over two days and by the last glass it had gained weight and complexity. At £22 direct from Gutter & Stars, it’s about the same price as Miraval, and I know which ones I’d rather drink. Highly recommended, though you’ll have to hurry as he’s only made 500 bottles.
Finally if you want something that’s just huge fun. I always enjoy Paso Pimero’s Somontano Rosado which is a taste of a classic full-bodied Spanish pink. It’s made by two former Tanners employees, Tom and Emma Holt, in Aragon. It looks like a strawberry mivi and usually tastes a bit like one too. I haven’t had the latest vintage but the 2021 was delicious with a full texture with red fruit and tangy orange peel notes. I can imagine drinking this with pretty much anything, especially as it’s currently only £10.40 a bottle at Tanners. Fill your boots.
I’m always looking out for rosés with colour so please do let me know if you’ve tasted any recently.