Rosé

Rose is the most misunderstood category in wine, mainly because people read the colour as a sweetness signal. It is not. Almost every bottle on this page is dry, and the pale ones are not drier than the darker ones.

What the colour actually tells you is how the wine was made. Direct press, where black grapes are pressed immediately and the juice takes only a whisper of colour from the skins, gives the pale salmon Provence style: delicate, mineral, built for drinking cold in the sun. The saignee method bleeds juice off a red wine ferment after some hours of skin contact, and produces something deeper in colour with more fruit and more grip.

Provence is well represented here through Chateau Roubine, one of the classified estates of the Cotes de Provence, and Le Grand Cros. Alongside them sits Bandol, a small appellation on the Mediterranean coast where Mourvedre leads the blend and the rose is structured enough to serve with a main course. Domaine du Gros Nore and Chateau Barthes both work there.

Spain appears through Muga's Rioja rosado, and the Australian bottles run from McLaren Vale and the Barossa through to the Yarra Valley and the Mornington Peninsula.

Pale does not mean dry and dark does not mean sweet, a point our explainer on rose wine unpacks along with the grapes behind each style.

History

Rose is not a modern invention. It is close to the oldest style of wine there is. Before the technology existed to macerate red grapes for long periods and control the resulting ferment, most red wine was pale, and what the ancient Mediterranean drank would look much more like rose than like a modern Shiraz.

The wine's reputation suffered badly in the second half of the twentieth century, when sweet, semi sparkling pink wine became a mass market commodity in several countries and taught a generation that pink meant sweet.

The recovery came out of Provence. Producers there had continued making dry rose as a serious wine rather than a by product, and from the 1990s onward the pale Provencal style became a global reference point. The region now devotes the overwhelming majority of its production to it.

Bandol followed a different path. Its Mourvedre based roses have long been treated as food wines rather than aperitifs, and they have a small but committed following among people who want a pink wine with actual structure.

Australia's dry rose category is recent and has grown quickly. Producers here work with Grenache, Shiraz, Sangiovese, Pinot Noir and Mourvedre, and the results are generally drier and more citrus driven than their French equivalents.

How to drink it

Serve it cold but not glacial. Eight to ten degrees suits most bottles. Below that you lose the aromatics entirely and the wine tastes of nothing but acid. Bandol and other structured roses can go a little warmer, around twelve.

Use a white wine glass. The small tulip glasses often sold for rose are too narrow to let anything develop.

Drink it young. Most rose is made to be consumed within a year or two of the vintage, and the pale Provencal style in particular loses its lift quickly. There are exceptions, and Bandol is the clearest of them, but as a rule the current release is the one to buy.

On food, rose is more useful than its reputation suggests. The lighter styles handle salads, seafood, goat's cheese and charcuterie. The deeper ones cope with grilled lamb, roast chicken, tomato based dishes and anything from a barbecue. It is one of very few wines that works with both a hot Australian lunch and a chilli heavy dish.

For related styles, look at white wine, sparkling wine and French wine.