Rosé Wine Guide

So, rosés come from all over the world. They are made in a variety of different styles, but one thing that rosés are not are the sweet, glowing, white zinfandel or blush wines that are still on the market today, but were really, really popular about 10-15 years ago. Rosés are almost always dry wines, and you can expect flavors of strawberries, raspberries, tart cherries. Oftentimes, rosés will have herb flavors like mint or basil or oregano, and also some rosés will have a little bit of a citrus flavor like blood oranges or grapefruit. To understand about rosés, I think it's important to understand how rosés are made. Rosés are always made from red grapes. They are made from things like Syrah or Grenache or Cabernet or Pinot Noir even. So, when you make rosé, you're making them from red grapes, but when you squeeze a red grape, the juice runs clear. Rosés get their color from the skin of red grapes just like red wines do. So, when winemakers make rosé in particular, they take red grapes, they crush them, and then they soak the skins of the red grapes into the clear juice for a very short amount of time. Once the winemaker has achieved the desired color from the skin of the red grapes, they drain all of the juice off, separate the skins from the juice, and then ferment the pink juice. One way that you can tell what kind of rosé to expect is by looking at the color of the rosé. So, rosés can be very, very pale in this beautiful salmon color, and they can be very, very dark and deep red color. The flavor profile can closely follow the color of the wine. So, if you see that a wine is very pale, you can expect very light, tart raspberry or strawberry flavors. If the rosé is really dark in color, you can expect darker cherry flavors, really bright blackberry flavors, and you can expect the wines to be a little bit richer in body as well. This rosé from Chinon is made from Cabernet Franc and has a very, very dark berry cherry flavor to it. The next two rosés are among my very favorite in the store, and they happen to be very inexpensive. The interesting thing about both of these rosés is that they're made from primarily Syrah grapes. However, they're made in a very, very different style. The one on my right here is the Beeler rosé from the Provence region in the southeast of France, and it's a very light style and has a beautiful herbal quality to it. Next to it is the Charles and Charles rosé from Washington State. It, too, is primarily Syrah, but it has really deep, dark, rich berry cherry flavors that go really, really well with barbecue. To learn a little bit more about what kind of food pairs with rosé, let's go to Nick's on Broadway and talk to chef owner Derrick Wagner. When we're doing wine pairings here at the restaurant, we talk about table wines. We all have individual tastes and things that we might gravitate towards, but we look for when we have larger groups or families or a mixed group of maybe younger and older people with different palates, we try to find those wines that will make great table wines that'll go well with, you're having steak, I'm having fish, or someone likes dry wines, someone likes sweet wines. We don't want to order two bottles. Let's find something that goes in the many of our rosés are often wonderful table wines in that way where they just go with just about everything. Yeah, that makes me happy. We like to buck the tradition of that, you know, it only has this one place. It can only be drank in the early springtime. It only goes, as much as it goes wonderfully with oysters, and we often do do a lot of shellfish pairings with it, that it goes with other things as well and things that people just normally wouldn't think or gravitate towards. One of the things right now that we think that it goes exceptionally well with is fish and vegetables, so for brunch we'll do a lot of fresh fish and we'll often leave the skin on and let it get nice and crispy so it gets that minerally, briny, you know, just salt water, beautiful, beautiful flavor. We'll put the fish right on top of mixed vegetables and right now we have beautiful spring vegetables, asparagus, fiddleheads, we get Rhode Island mushrooms which you get a little earthiness, you get a little crisp vegetal, you know, flavor going on with all the green veggies. Derek, thank you so much. This has been really fun chatting with you. You're welcome. Cheers. Cheers to you. Cheers to rosé. Yeah, rosé.