Don’t Judge a Rosé by Its Color

Spring is becoming summer and that means one thing: rosé season is here. By indulging in a glass of pink wine, you are taking part in a fully ancient winemaking tradition. Rosé in some form is well documented in Greek and Roman antiquity. Diluting red wines to a lighter shade was believed more sophisticated in ancient Greece, and field blends of white and red grapes that resulted in lightly colored wines were commonplace in Rome.

Over the centuries the fashion for rosé has ebbed and flowed. In the past decade or so, it has become difficult not to marvel at the massive wave of increasingly pale rosés that have washed up at wine shop shelves across the globe. This is truly a rather recent phenomenon. Up until the early aughts wine critics and experts were in consensus that the best rosé wines were the darker ones. Today, the pendulum has swung in favor of the contemporary stylings of Provence—the motherland for pale pink wine. We love so many of these wines from Provence and beyond. But in actuality, great rosé comes in every color. Only exploring every shade of the color spectrum will the sheer vividness of the dynamic rosé category come to light.

A rosé is effectively a red wine made as if it were a white. Red wines get their color by leaving the juice in contact with the skins of the grapes before, during, and potentially after fermentation. For red grapes, the color, in the form of anthocyanin, lives in its skins; nearly all red grapes have naturally clear juice. For this reason, it is possible to make a white wine from red grapes. Champagne, for example is commonly, and in some cases exclusively, made with Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. Both red grapes, they can still produce a white Champagne through a gentle pressing and zero extended maceration time between the juice and the skins.

A rosé’s depth of color is generally proportional to the amount of time allotted for this maceration. Some rosés that exhibit an extremely pale copper or salmon hue may be direct pressed—a common method today whereby skins are immediately removed from the juice after pressing. Some rosé wines may be given a few hours, and darker rosés might spend several days up to even a week macerating. Such famous deep rosés as Tavel from France’s Southern Rhône Valley or Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo from Italy’s central Adriatic coast rarely spend less than a day on their skins, if not significantly longer. Some rosés can get so darkly colored, in fact, that they are nearly indistinguishable from a light-bodied red wine. In this sense, what makes a rosé is more a state of mind, a philosophy personal to a winegrower, than it is firm red line on the color wheel.

There are also several practices a winemaker can choose to decrease the color of a rosé. Rosé that spends time aging in barrel will commonly lose some color before bottling. The porous wood allows for some microoxygenation, which modifies the color of the wine, imparting a soft coppery tint. Similarly, a rosé that matures on its lees (the spent yeast cells that are usually discarded after fermentation) may also grow paler. The lees absorb some of that color themselves, basically sucking it out of the wine. There are also common treatments during the final processes before bottling that can help precipitate color from the wine, should a winemaker be seeking a certain aesthetic.

What is most important to note is that exceptional rosés are made across the world using each of these techniques. No single process makes a rosé wine better or worse—they are simply options that help a winemaker achieve their vision for how their rosé should look, taste, or feel. Pale rosés are great. But, we love a dark fuchsia one just as much.