Today the Ideal Wine Company has
decided to tackle one of the most annoying wine myths known to man. We’ve
geared ourselves up to ask: why is rose wine pink?
The rise of rose wine
Go back a decade or two and rose
wine was nothing more than a novelty. At best, it was the bottle you would only
break out on a particularly scorching summer’s day. At worst, you wouldn’t have
even heard of it.
However you can buy some stunning rose wines. A good pink wine manages to mix
the bright, fresh characteristics of an un-oaked white, with the rich berry-fruit
flavours of a hearty red. People have started to catch on in the last decade,
and now you’re just as likely to see rose on the supermarket shelves as you
would it’s darker and lighter equivalents.
It’s not a blend!
The rising popularity of rose
wine has only more people curious. A lot of wine enthusiasts don’t know how
their pink drink of choice is made. We want to take a minute to clear something
up. Rose wine is not a blend!
White wine is made from white
grapes (mostly). Red wine is made from red grapes. This leads people to believe
that rose wine is made by blending white wine and red wine. No.
From clear to pink
It’s usually made with red
grapes. In the EU it must be made
with red grapes. Did you know that grape juice is clear when it’s first pressed?
It’s the skin of the grape that makes wine a certain colour.
This means that white wine is
made from grapes with light skins. It can also be made with dark-skinned grapes
if the skin is separated out before the juice is left to ferment. Red wines are
left to ferment with the skins of the dark grapes they’re made from to attain
their famous colour.
Now we get to rose. Rose receives
it’s colour in a similar way to red. Dark-skinned grapes are lightly crushed
and allowed to macerate with their skins for a short time during fermentation, to provide the tipple with a lovely
pink blush. The juice is then separated out and fermented in tanks.
How was your Dom Perignon Rose 1996 made?
So next time you break out a
bottle of Dom
Perignon Rose 1996 bought from the Ideal Wine Company, stop and think. This
decadent rose champagne isn’t a crude blend of white and red grape juice. It
was lovingly made to provide you with the shining pink glow that no
rose-drinking experience is complete without!
