Rosé’s Dirty Secret

Rosé has exploded in popularity in recent years, and for good reason: a good glass of rosé can be sublime. Tart, refreshing, food-friendly, and versatile, well-made rosé is the perfect companion for a sunny day, a wide swath of lighter dishes, or as an aperitif before a meal. However, rosé’s meteoritic rise in consumption raises a question: How was the wine industry able to so easily meet Americans’ appetite for rosé? The answer to that question is complicated and reveals a side to rosé that most wine companies would rather customers not know.

Traditionally, most rosé wines around the world were made with the “skin contact” method. Red grapes are harvested with the intention of them being used for rosé wine. They start their maceration – the process of extracting flavor and color from the grapes – but before the wine can pick up too much color or bitter tannins from the skins, the wine is pressed or racked off the skins, leaving a delicately colored and flavored rosé. Because great rosés are refreshing, the red grapes that go into skin-contact rosé are picked earlier, which translates to lower alcohol and higher acid in the finished wine, which is exactly what you want for a crisp, refreshing glass of rosé.

This brings us to rosé’s dirty secret: most rosé consumed in America is not made this way.

When consumer tastes change, there is usually some lag time as the wine industry catches up. Vineyards have to be regrafted, if not torn up and replanted entirely, a process that takes three years before the first crop can be harvested. How is it than that as soon as rosé wine exploded in popularity, there was a glut of rosé wines in the market to satisfy consumers’ thirst for pink wine? Did the wine industry predict rosé’s popularity, planting the red grapes on the right soils and best vineyard sites to make the perfect rosé three years earlier?

No.

To make an intense, deeply colored, and flavored red wine, there is a trick that many wine producers use. Early in the fermentation process, they will bleed off juice from the developing wine, leaving a higher skin-to-juice ratio. The bled-off juice is then discarded, used to top off barrels in the winery, or make roée. This is called the saignee method, and when rosé exploded in popularity, it was the technique that the wine industry turned to in order to meet the burgeoning demand.

Using bleed-off juice to make a rosé isn’t necessarily bad per se, but it has many drawbacks, all of which are due to the fact that rosé made in this way is a by-product of red wine production. When red grapes are harvested, wineries are looking for much higher sugar levels and lower acid levels than when picking for white or rosé. What that means is that saignee rosés are some of the most manipulated wines on the market today.

Wineries take the low-acid, high-sugar bleed-off juice and then have to use additives and fining agents to make the refreshing style that customers love. Citric or Tartaric acids are added to the wine to pump up the acid profile. Water is added to lower the alcohol level. A host of fining agents, such as Chitosan, polyvinylpolypyrrolidone (PVPP), milk proteins, fish bladder, egg whites, and others, are used to clarify the wine and strip the color from it so that it shows an attractive salmon pink color on the shelf.

When done well, these wines can be delicious, but too often, they can’t escape their origin as a byproduct, and the manipulation of these wines is often clumsy. To cover these flaws, wineries will hide the imperfections by leaving high levels of residual sugar in the wine, hoping that the sweetness will cover up harsh acidification, high alcohol content, or red-wine polyphenols. Others don’t acidify their wines enough, leading to flabby rosé, which is one of the last wines I’d ever drink.

How do you avoid poorly made rosé? Look for producers who are making rosé intentionally. Old World wineries that have been making rosé for generations are a great bet – Chateau du Campuget, Whispering Angel, and others – as are American wineries that make their wine in a clean, minimal additive style. Some of my favorite domestic rosé brands are The Fableist, Groundwork, and Fiction by Field Recordings.

So, before you reach for a bottle of rosé for this year’s Thanksgiving celebration (and rosé does make for a great Turkey wine), you may want to do a little research on what you’re buying because instead of a delicious wine, you may be buying one of the wine industry’s dirty secrets instead.