Rosé wines! History & how they are made

What's up everyone? Today we're going to be talking about rosé. A little bit about the history, a little bit how we make it. So let's go check it out right now. Hi everyone. Today we are going to talk about rosé. Yeah, I love rosés. Fun, fruity, bright, great wine. And rosé, there's no really date of origin, but I think it was the first wine ever made was rosé. I think it was like 7,000 BC. No, they didn't really, winemakers didn't have the tools that we have now to extract color from the skins of the berries. So if you think about it, berries have pulp inside and seeds and skin. Well, all of the color comes from the skin. So you have to press the grapes off of the skins to get color and also ferment at a high temperature in the tank to get color. Yeah. And I don't even think people really cared about how wine looked or appearances as much as they were trying to get, which is kind of funny because people were watering wines down back when they were making it because they didn't want to get that drunk. They wanted to drink a lot, but not get drunk. In Greece, it was kind of looked down upon to ever be slurring your words. And I mean, I guess still to this day it is. So they would actually add water to lower the alcohol of their wines, making it more of a rosé color and less of a red wine. When rosé actually became known as rosé, that was more like the sixth century when it was brought to France, to Provence, southern France. What was the city? Marseille, I think is the area, the region. Southern Rome. Yes. If I'm not mistaken. And it was brought there. And I think the United States kind of laughed at France in a sense and was like, why are you making pink wines? We don't really, we didn't really understand the whole idea behind rosé. Now, if you think about it, every wine list, every restaurant has rosé on the menu. Yeah. Super popular. I think it's one of the fastest growing wine categories in the past couple of years. And it seems like everybody's kind of making their own version of rosé, which is exciting. But a cool thing in Rome was they kind of established the style for making it and kind of got it going. And then they've been doing it for, like you said, several hundreds of years. And there was more of a field blend too as well when grapes were brought over. It wasn't all Cabernet. There'd be a mix of a little bit of Viognier or a white grape in there. So that also helped create the rosé color is picking whites and red grapes, not really knowing that there was whites planted in those vineyards. And I think that region kind of helped to get the style established to where it was lighter, lower alcohol and fresher, brighter acidity. So not sweet. I think a lot of a lot of people have this opinion about rosé that rosé is always going to be sweet, which I think it's kind of the opposite. I think that most rosés nowadays are dry and we shouldn't have to say, oh, this is a dry rosé. People should assume unless we say it's a sweet rosé. But see, Sierra is younger than I am being an older winemaker. The reality of the matter was in California, in the United States, people started drinking rosés when they were blushes. And a lot of that came out of Bob Trinchero, Sutter Home, when he made in the 70s, by mistake, he made a rosé when he bled some juice off from one of his red Zinfandel tanks and it stuck on him. And so stuck meaning, you know, stop fermenting the sugar. And so of that was born white Zinfandel. And when I was a winemaker early on in the late 90s, mid 90s, there were millions and millions of gallons of white Zinfandel being sold. And that was one of the most popular wines. And it was a three percent sugar, fruity, and that's low alcohol too, like eight to ten percent. And then it was like in the 2000s when the United States started tasting these Provence style rosés and drinking French rosés. I think New York and the Hamptons was a key area. People were at the beach, it was good weather, they were drinking these rosés. And it's funny because sommeliers would laugh in the 2000s about people drinking pink wines. They would never rate them, give them scores, talk about how they were made, any of that, because they didn't think it was a serious wine. So it wasn't really until 2014 that rosé became popular and started being on every wine list, wine label. And rosé can be made in about three different ways, I would say. And we have two in front of us that we make here at Oak Farm, and two different styles of rosés, two different ways of making it. So I don't know if you want to talk about kind of the differences. Yeah, I'll talk about, I kind of think with what we were talking with the Provence style, the real light color, the real delicate, lighter style, those wines are typically made by putting grapes direct to press. And so, like Sierra mentioned, you'll see red grapes, they typically have the color in their skins, and the juice is actually clear. So they make the rosé very similar to the way they would a white wine. And just that little bit of pink salmon, pretty rusty color is just a little bit of that color going into the juice. So to be clear, rosé is not a grape. Exactly. Rosé is a type of wine. Style. It's a style of wine making. You can make rosé out of Grenache like we have, or Sangio and Barbera. You can make a Pinot Noir rosé. It's just taking those red grapes and putting it, like Chad said, directly into the press and treating it like a white wine. Exactly. And you typically would pick the grapes at a lower sugar content than you would for, let's say, red wine making when you're making that Provence direct to press kind of style. The next one is a word, it's probably the first fancy French word I learned in... I still have trouble spelling it every time. Seigneur. Which is kind of, means to bleed. That's the best way to think about it when you're pulling blood away from something. And so you can talk about seigneur in a tank to make rosé. Yeah. So when we're picking red grapes, you pick it out, like Chad was saying earlier, a higher brix, a higher sugar level than you do whites. And so what we would do is we'd pick the red grape and we'd de-stem it and put it in the tank. The grapes, berries, the skins, everything. And we want to concentrate that color. We want to make dark colored, big wines. And so we'll take a little bit of juice at the very beginning out. And it's mostly water and a little bit of color. And take that away so that there's more skin to juice ratio. So it'll be a darker wine in the tank. And you can take that portion that you bleed off and treat it like a white wine from that point forward and make it into a rosé like we do here with our Sangio Barbera rosé. Yeah. And that style, I mean, this is where you're going to see so many different variations of rosé because you can see the very light, delicate, sensitive, soft type, which is going to be more of the direct-to-press. And then the longer you leave that juice on the skins, the deeper the color. And you'll see some rosés have a... Oh, like red. Yeah, they are almost like a red wine. And that's just longer time that that juice has had with the skins. And then the third way of making it, which is kind of, I mean, they use it in champagne, they use it in sparkling wine productions. There's a varying degree of it when you're making Chianti's, but they've typically taken white wines and then they've used a little bit of red wine to bleed back into that. And so some of those wines have kind of fallen under the category of rosé. Yeah, you could do that. I mean, you can take a white kind of blush and need to add a little more color to it. And you can do that by adding some of the red wine to it. Less desirable, in my opinion, not the right way to make it, but that's another way. Less balanced, I think. Yeah, less balanced, less, you know, less true to the style. But, I mean, looking at these two wines that we make here at Oak Farm and tasting them, one is made direct to press and picked early, the other one we saigné. And they're similar in ways. If you look at the color, they're the same color, but you can definitely tell that this estate rosé has more of those darker fruits. And you think about it, as grapes ripen on a vine, they're going to get less of that, like, strawberry light characteristic, and they're going to turn more raisiny and get a little bit more blueberry, blackberry. So smelling them, this one I get darker fruits, you know, a little overripe strawberry, overripe raspberry, and the other one is a little light and delicate, a little more floral and fresh. And I don't have a favorite. They're both good. They're both just a little different, and it's kind of preference-wise. Yeah, and I think it's important to realize that you can take any red grape and make a rosé wine out of it. So there are grapes that tend, in my opinion, to be better for making rosés, and they tend to be the more high-acid, fresher fruit, kind of less savory or less herbal grapes. So grapes like Zinfandel, Grenache, you know, Cinsault, Sangiovese, Barbera, those are, in my opinion, really good grapes to consider for a rosé program. Merlot. Cab's going to be a little heavy. Cab. I've made some rosé cabs in the past just because we thought it would be a grape that people would love, and boy, it tastes like cabbage, and it just doesn't have the... Green characteristics. I think those Bordeaux blends kind of, I mean, those Bordeaux grapes kind of have more vegetal characteristics. Exactly. So you definitely want to pick the right kind of grape. So come out to Oak Farm and try some rosé, sit on our patio. It's great weather, and enjoy. Yeah, rosé all day. All day. Cheers.