WHETHER FAD OR FASHION, PINK WINES ARE IN STYLE

Last week, catching up with master sommelier Evan Goldstein at the Vancouver International Wine Festival got me thinking about his take on rosé wines in his excellent and timeless book Perfect Pairings: A Master Sommelier's Practical Advice for Partnering Wine and Food.

The line “a rosé is a rosé except when it is ... a rosé!” reveals indecision about the multitude of styles in the market. There is no blueprint from colourless to pink, red, or near black (although, thankfully, the latter is disappearing). It also reflects how much sugar may or may not be in the bottle. From dry to sweet and everything in between, I believe that the best rosés are often only exceeded by the worst.

Fad or fashion, pink wines are in and, in the new age of wine, they're available in bottles, cans and perhaps the most useful of all formats, bag-in-the-box. It may be the first important category of wine to have escaped the straitjacket of the traditional bottle-and-cork format. But unfortunately, with all the excitement and demand come marketers and copycat producers leaving consumers with a flood of similar-looking forgettable and unforgettable “rosé that is a rosé except when it is not.”

It doesn't mean you can't enjoy the rosé renaissance; you need only do some homework. If you didn't know, the best rosés are now made in the vineyard long before they get to the winery. After that, most rosé begins life much like red wine, inside a tank fermenting on its skins. The trick is to get the juice off the skins quickly, stealing only a hint of colour and with little or no tannin. After that, it's more or less treated like a white wine till it's bottled. Similarly, when served, it should be chilled like white wine. However, I recommend you attune the temperature to the residual sugar level — the sweeter the wine, the cooler the serving temperature. Again, the sweetest should be well-chilled, while the driest is best served with only the slightest chill on the bottle.

When the warm weather finally arrives, consider serving your pinks outdoors in the setting best suited to the nature of these wines. Goldstein prefers the lighter, drier vin Gris style rosé that comes from using more delicate grapes such as Pinot Noir or Grenache. The master sommelier says to try them with “fish, fowl, white meats, grains, pasta and summer produce.”

The off-dry and sweet bottles that dominate the shelves are another choice, and the advice is to serve them the same way you might use a Riesling or a Chenin Blanc. Again, thoroughly chilled and then mingled with big barbecue sauce-covered burgers or ribs, aromatic curries and spicy Asian fare.

Provence is the original benchmark, but several B.C. labels give the glamorous French region a run for its money. I have become hooked on the almost colourless versions of rosé.

The palest editions boast the finest in ethereal fruit flavours and finesse with a minimum of residual sugar. Modern techniques have made it possible to achieve Provence-like wines where the grape variety is no longer the crucial ingredient.

Instead, freshness, vibrancy and a less-is-more style are the keys to success.

Today we recommend several outstanding efforts from B.C. You can read full-tasting notes at gismondionwine.com, but the wines to look for this month are Orofino 2021 Pozza Vineyard Cabernet Franc Rosé $21.65; Seven Directions 2021 Fruitvale Ridge Vineyard Cabernet Franc Rosé $22.99; Liquidity 2021 Rosé $30; French Door 2021 Rosé $32; Modest Wines 2021 The Eye of the Partridge Pinot Noir Rosé $24.99; Tantalus 2021 Rosé $23.48; and Haywire 2020 Gamay Noir Rosé Secrest Mountain Vineyard $23.99.