The rise of yacht rosé

With the first glimpses of sunshine spotted in southern England this month, it’s time for the inevitable rosé article.

There’s a genre of music from the late 70s/ early 80s dubbed yacht rock: smooth, heavily-produced music made by virtuoso musicians with too much money.  Think bands such as Steely Dan, Hall & Oates and the Doobie Brothers. And to drink on your yacht with such music? There can be only one candidate: Provencal rosé, the more expensive the better. 

You can’t miss these wines in the supermarket. They come in a bewildering array of bottles from the amphora-shaped, to bowling pins, squared-off shoulders, and even entirely square bottles. Then there’s the distinctive colour, Provencal rosés have to be as pale as possible. It’s all a far cry from when I worked in a wine shop in the late ‘90s when rosé was zinfandel blush, bright red Spanish rosado or sickly sweet Rosé d’Anjou. Nobody would have dreamed of spending more than £6 on a bottle.

In contrast yacht rosés can sell for over £100 for wines like  Chateau d’Esclans Garrus. It sounds outrageous but this is a drop in the ocean for their target market. Sacha Lichine from the Bordeaux family that owns Esclans was quoted as saying: “I knew we had arrived when I got a call from a top yacht-builder wanting the dimensions of our three-litre double-magnums. . . . . He wanted to make sure he built a fridge on a yacht that was big enough.”

Esclans are best known for their more prosaic Whispering Angel brand (around £20 a bottle). Other names to look out for include Menuty, Domaine Ott, Chateau Gassier, MiP (made in Provence) and Miraval. Yacht rosé shares some similarities with champagne; they both sell on image as much as content. The crucial difference is if you spent £80 on a bottle of champagne, Pol Roger vintage for example, you’re going to get a lot of flavour compared with a £30 bottle. Expensive champagne tastes expensive, rosé’s pleasures are more ethereal. British wine writer Andrew Jefford who lives in the south of France tried to explain it to me:

“The art of crafting great rosé is the art of understatement.  It's all a question of nuances, subtleties, suggestions, hints and whispers.  The more forceful a rosé is, the less good it is. A blockbuster red can be great; a blockbuster rosé would be a comprehensive failure.  The reason being that sippability, drinkability is even more important for rosé than for most wines.”

These delicate wines are made by lightly pressing red grapes, mainly cinsault and grenache, so that just a little colour seeps into the wine. Sometimes this is done so subtly that the wine is almost indistinguishable from a white wine. The rosé paradox is that the most expensive are often the least intense. With a little reflection and enough money in your pocket you might notice flavours of strawberries, peaches, herbs and sometimes a faint nuttiness. 

We think of this as the classic Provence style but it’s actually very recent. Until the ‘00s Provence was a much darker colour. These new wines were made possible by technology: computer-controlled presses to extract tiny amounts of colour from the grapes and inert gas to keep the grapes free from oxygen which ideally should be harvested at night for maximum freshness. Unlike champagne which needs to be matured, rosé can be sold the summer after vintage which is why accountant’s love it. 

The 2023s are just about to arrive in shops but the better quality rosés are usually at their best in the autumn, just as the sun is beginning to disappear. Those ethereal flavours take a little time to come out. Nowadays pretty much all rosé is made in the Provencal ultra pale style whether they’re from Spain, South Africa, or even England. I have mixed feelings about this, sometimes I yearn for a bit of heft in my pink, but when you’ve just been paid, the sun’s out and I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do) comes on the stereo, nothing tastes better than yacht rosé.