Everyone loves rosé. It’s the perfect warm weather wine. It’s all the pretty fruit flavors of a red but is cold and refreshing like a white. The best of both worlds. I’ve asked every single guests on our wine tours this question, “How do you make rose?” I would say less than 10% have answered correctly. It’s not a complicated concept but it’s also not something we think about either. The usual answer I get is mixing white and red wine together. A logical conclusion because that’s how it works with paint! Not so with wine. I mean, it’ll work but, in fact, it cannot be labeled rosé if this is how it’s made. (There’s one exception, see below).
It starts with the grapes
The key to learning the process of how rose wine is made, you first need to understand the anatomy of a grape. A grape has 3 major components- the skin, the seed, and the pulp. The pulp, or juice inside the grape, is a milky gray mostly clear color. This is the case for all grapes even if the skin is green, yellow, red, blue, or black. Dark grapes have pigment which gives rose its color. The darker the skin of a grape, the darker and more opaque a wine can get. A green or yellow grape can never become red wine because there’s no color in their skins. Some winemakers might throw in some white grapes into their rose, you know, just to confuse matters.
Limited Skin Contact
The dominant method for making rosé is to minimize maceration, or skin contact. Maceration is the process of keeping juice together with the dark skins of red wine grapes. The longer the juice has the skins floating around the more color that will seep into the juice. For rose, this happens before fermentation even begins. The total maceration time for rosé is less than 24 hours. Again, even in this short amount of time, the longer the skins stay, the darker it will be. A very pale salmon color rose might have only had skin contact for an hour. More purply pink roses will have been longer. Once the winemaker is happy with the color, she transfers the juice to the press. The press separates the juice from the skins. The now pink juice finishes its fermentation in a vat.
Saignée Method of making rosé
Another method of making rosé is the saignée method. Saignée literally means to bleed, the French can paint quite the picture, whoa. Anyway, to darken a red wine, a winemaker will bleed off some of the juice, upping the skins to juice ratio, therefore the darker the wine will be. This method is usually an afterthought and rosé is more of a byproduct than an intentional wine.
Blending red and white wine
Only the Champagne region allows the blending method. Basically, at the end of the first fermentation, they’ll plop in a bit of Pinot Noir for color. As far as I’m concerned, Champagne can do whatever they want as long as they keep making that bubbly stuff.
Tell me your favorite rosé in the comments below.
