We drink first with our eyes; it’s only later that nose and tongue get involved. Silver-green Riesling, golden Sauternes, amber Cognac, midnight Guinness, roiled by its slowly resolving foam: invitation begins with a glance. Visual seduction is why most of us prefer drinks served in glasses rather than beakers, mugs or horns.
We live in pink times: global rosé production has risen by 25 per cent in the past ten years. In 2021, almost one in every ten bottles consumed worldwide was pink. Exports of rosé wine from Provence, the specialist wine region of France where nine out of ten bottles are pink, have soared by 500 per cent in the past 15 years.
The world has, in a way, been here before: wine made from red grapes was pale in times past, often the muddy orange-pink sometimes called onion skin or partridge’s eye. That was what the wines of Champagne (all still, not sparkling) probably looked like at the time of the great medieval cloth fairs held in the region, for example. And the “claret” beloved by Keats (“the only palate affair that I am at all sensual in”) was clairet, a translucent pale red that “fills one’s mouth with a gushing freshness – then goes down cool and feverless” (from an 1819 journal letter to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana).
The rosé wines that have fuelled recent growth are ultra-pale (so pale that their tint is sometimes described as “melancholy”) and spotlessly clean, both literally and metaphorically. They appeal through hint, nuance and understatement. They might smell of peach and taste almondy, but they do it so quietly you can’t be sure. They fill the mouth like a mist, then leave it fresh and unexhausted. Wines of this sort would have been impossible in the past: the technical means to create them didn’t exist.
Their grapes must be picked not just on the right day, but at the right minute of that day, seconds before early ripeness, and ideally at five in the morning. The bunches need handling as gently as eggs. They should be swiftly chilled, kept under inert gas, pressed softly and just long enough to extract that modicum of petal or salmon pink, then clarified but kept on their deposits at very low temperature, with a portion, perhaps, skin-macerated. They’re cool-fermented with specially selected yeasts, but often kept with their post-fermentative yeast lees for a while, then bottled under more inert gas. Plain glass bottles show off the colour to full advantage – but are dangerous, since exposure to light can “strike” wines and damage their aromatic integrity.
The drawback to the pink surge is that many producers hope colour alone will sell their wine. The results look convincingly chic, but smell and taste assertive, over-acidic, too sweet or too dry; too characterful, abrupt, even violent. Drinkers are nonplussed; the wine disappoints. It drinks badly.
This is Provence’s advantage: it has propitious natural conditions (soils, aspects, altitudes, even night breezes) for creating subtlety, and its winemakers have come over decades to understand that they’re pursuing a gazelle-like ideal of balance, poise and restraint. Provence’s Grenache grapes are more delicate than those made elsewhere; its Cinsault adds juicy refreshment; its Mourvèdre a little background frame and structure. Provence rules allow co-fermentation with a minority percentage of a white variety such as Vermentino, too, provided it represents less than 20 per cent of estate plantings. When done with skill, this brushes creaminess into the wine and increases its pastel charm. The hard-to-define quality of vinosity is another Provence rosé hallmark: literally “wininess”, it signifies an inner cursive line or sinew that helps shape the wine’s trajectory through the mouth, emphasising its fermentative seriousness and lending it food-friendliness.
Provence rosé wines in which you can find all these features are, sadly, not cheap – and it can seem strange to pay extra for qualities of disposition and discretion rather than flamboyance. At first.
[See also: The inventor of the Renaissance]
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This article appears in the 04 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Starmer under fire