Selecting A Quality Rosé Wine

With summer approaching fast, casual wine drinkers are starting to give more attention to rosé wines and white wines rather than the hearty red wines of winter. At this time of year we always tend to see a rise in sales of our still rosé wines and our sparkling rosé wine. It’s definitely a summery wine and you can’t turn more than half a dozen pages in the season’s lifestyle magazines without coming across a restaurant, beach or garden party scene with a bottle of rosé wine in there somewhere. Of course, it helps enormously that rosé wine is a perfect accompaniment to the types of food that tend to be more popular at this time of year, such as light pasta dishes, salads with dressings, spicy food and simple grilled meats and vegetables.

Award Winning Rosé Wines

Premier Estates Wine’s Italian Pinot Grigio Blush rosé wine and our South African Shiraz rosé wine have both recently won awards at the International Wine Challenge and Decanter Wine Awards, respectively. Both of these wines have always been very strong sellers for us and have received very favourable reviews on our online wine shop from delighted customers. However, it’s always great to receive acknowledgement from renowned wine experts in respect of all the hard work that the Premier Estates Wine production team has put into our rosé wine products.

What Is Rosé wine?

A rosé wine is a wine varying in colour from orange, to pink and through to deep purple depending upon the variety of grape used to make it and its appearance is more than likely how wine looked when it was first made many hundreds of years ago. It gets its colour from allowing the coloured grape skins to remain in contact with the “must” or crushed grape juice for a certain period of time. Rosé wines can be produced as still, semi-sparkling or sparkling and with a varying level of sweetness/dryness  from extra dry Provençal rosés to sweet white zinfandels and pinot grigio blushes.

How Is Rosé Wine Made?

Rosé wine is made using one of three methods; maceration, blending or the “saignée” method.

• Maceration – This is the traditionally used and most common method of making quality rosé wines. The grape “must” or crushed fruit flesh remains in contact with the coloured grape skins for a certain amount of time depending upon the required colour and flavours of the wine. The longer the must stays in contact with the grape skins, the deeper the rosé hue it retains. This period of skin contact time is usually from 2 to 20 hours.
  
  
• Saignée Method – This is a less commonly used method of producing rosé wine and it involves “bleeding” off a certain amount of the juice used to make red wine during the first few hours of its production, generally about 5%. This serves two purposes; the first is to produce a generally high quality, rich rosé wine and the second is to intensify the flavours, aromas and colour of the remaining red wine must.
  
  
• Blending – The blending method is really only used in the production of some pink Champagnes and sparkling rosé wines. Red wine and white wine grape must is blended or mixed to produce a liquid of the required colour.

Premier Estates Rosé Wines

• Californian Zinfandel Rosé Wine – this type of rosé wine is incredibly popular in the U.S.A. and accounts for a significant percentage of overall wine sales. It is also very popular worldwide. It is made using the Zinfandel wine grape producing a sweeter than average rosé.
• Italian Pinot Grigio Blush – we produce this dry, light and refreshing rosé wine in Italy and source the grapes used to make it from one of the finest vineyards in north eastern Italy.
• South African Shiraz Rosé – this crisp rosé wine is very popular with our existing customers and is currently attracting an ever increasing number of new customers. It is made, using Shiraz grapes, by the maceration method to give the wine its rich, strawberry colour.

To find out more about our award winning rosé wines, visit the rosé product page at www.premierestateswine.co.uk/collections/case-of-6-rose-wine. You can purchase a case of 6 or just a single bottle to give it a try, and take advantage of FREE UK delivery.