Tag: ROSE

10 Top-Rated Rosé Wines, From Provence to Your Couch

Spring has sprung and that means it’s time for rosé all day. Here are our picks for choice bottles from the French region that started it all, Provence.

Rosé season is upon us. The best way to transition into warmer weather is with a bottle from Provence, the French region that started the pink-wine craze.

Delightfully fruity, yet impeccably honed by crisp acidity (and sometimes tangy minerality), rosés from Provence are often considered the top in their category. While usually made from a mix of red grapes—the roster can include Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Cinsault, Grenache and Mourvèdre—some bottlings can even include the white grape Vermentino, or Rolle, as it’s called locally.

Here are some of the top-scoring Provence rosés from across the region that are hitting shelves and online shops. Scoop them up and enjoy a bit of Provençal sunshine in a bottle.

Château Vignelaure 2019 Rosé (Coteau d’Aix-en-Provence); $22, 93 points. Produced from organic grapes, this ripe wine is well structured and richly elegant. It has depth and concentration as well as a touch of tannins from the Cabernet and Syrah in the blend. The wine is just ready to drink, although it will be better from late 2020. Monsieur Touton Selection Ltd. Editors’ Choice. –Roger Voss Continue reading “10 Top-Rated Rosé Wines, From Provence to Your Couch” →

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How could 10 million bottles of cheap Spanish rosé be passed off as French? Blame America

Our insatiable love for pink wine created a booming market that helped lay the groundwork for fraud.

Lovers of French wine are suddenly seeing red. Earlier this year, they feared they wouldn’t have enough of their beloved rosé to get them through the summer, because Americans are buying it all. Now it seems much of the vaunted French pink they’ve been consuming the past two years has in fact been cheap Spanish rosado.

France’s consumer fraud authority confirmed July 9 that over the past two years, unscrupulous wine merchants have passed off as many as 70,000 hectoliters — the equivalent of 10 million bottles — of cheap Spanish wine as more-expensive French rosé. That’s shocking news in a country where protesters have been known to stop tanker trucks with imported wines and empty their contents on the road near the border.

That giant sucking sound over the past few years was U.S. consumers discovering they love rosé and buying and drinking as much as they could. Demand soared, and the rosé market boomed, with many more labels appearing on U.S. shelves, and earlier in the year than ever before as brands competed for shelf space. Prices rose, and shippers tried to send as much as they could to take advantage

This kind of story plays well in the media, because it reinforces two popular stereotypes: Those crafty French, and the snooty wine snobs who can’t tell the difference between plonk and the good stuff. Snickering aside, it also highlights basic economics and current trends in the production and marketing of wine [ . . . ]

Continue reading at THE WASHINGTON POST: How could 10 million bottles of cheap Spanish rosé be passed off as French? Blame America. – The Washington Post

9 Big Bottles of Impressively Good Rosé 

9 Big Bottles of Impressively Good Rosé

Has rosé had its day? Well, in short, no. Sales continued to skyrocket last summer, Instagram is awash in selfies of rosé-wielding partyers, and, what the heck, a chilled glass of dry pink wine is incredibly refreshing. But when I heard that the latest de rigueur accessory for superyacht buyers along the Mediterranean coast of France is a supersized wine refrigerator to accommodate supersized bottles of rosé, I did wonder whether we’d reached a rosé point of no return. (Hey, is that a shark? Should we … jump it?)

But, also, I get it. Rosé is a party wine; it’s fun in a bottle. The bigger the bottle, the more the fun. Plus, it’s one of the most aesthetically appealing wines, with its multifarious shades of pink, and a magnum (or bigger) only serves to show off its light-catching pizzazz. Statistics bear this out: In France, sales of magnums of rosé from Provence alone more than quintupled from 2005 to 2016, according to data from the Wines of Provence Council and IRI. (A related trend is the seaside Côte d’Azur penchant for serving a piscine de rosé. The term basically means “a swimming pool of rosé,” and that’s what it is: rosé poured into a goblet full of ice.)

A magnum, by the way, is the equivalent of two regular bottles. Not every winery contributing to the ocean of rosé now in the market has caught onto this trend, but more and more have. And even larger bottles are sometimes 
available: three-liter (usually called a Jeroboam), six-liter (Methuselah), or even 15-liter (Nebuchadnezzar—the equivalent of 20 regular bottles). You won’t have much luck finding them at the supermarket, but if you go to a good wine shop, ask; often they can be ordered.

Here are nine rosés that are both impressively good and nationally available in magnums. Seek them out. Throw a party. Why not? Summer is here.

NV Naveran Cava Brut Rosé ($35) 

The family behind this lively Spanish sparkler has been growing grapes for over a century. It’s made from Pinot Noir plus the local variety Parellada, grown in organically farmed vineyards high up in Spain’s Penedès region. [ . . . ]

Continue to read at FOOD & WINE: 9 Big Bottles of Impressively Good Rosé | Food & Wine

2018’s Best Rosé Wines: What To Drink Now

[FORBES]

It’s not your imagination, rosé season starts earlier each year. Some might argue that, like Scrooge with Christmas, rosé season is meant to be honored all year long, in part because the pink wine is synonymous with laid-back days and convivial nights. “Rosé is rarely something you drink alone,” Diving Into Hampton Water co-founder Jesse Bongiovi says. “It’s really approachable. It’s not a Bordeaux or something like that, where you feel you need a real education in order to enjoy it.””When we first came up with this idea a year and a half ago, people were drinking rosé  from Memorial Day to Labor Day,” Bongiovi adds. “That time period just gets longer and longer. People now pick up rosé earlier in the spring and don’t put it down until November.”

Here is a selection of buzzy new releases to sip at your spring and summer parties. And no, you don’t have to wait until Memorial Day [ . . . ]

Continue at FORBES: 2018’s Best Rosé Wines: What To Drink Now

Exports of rosé from Provence boom thanks to American wine lovers


Exports of rosé wine from Provence have shot up and it’s largely because Americans have a growing thirst for the pink drink. But why is that?

THE LOCAL

The popularity of the drink which was mocked just 20 years ago has reached new heights abroad.

And that’s particularly true in the US, with the country accounting for a whopping 50 percent of exports of the Provencal rosé wine last year.
“The phenomenon of the internationalization of rosé wines from Provence is accelerating,” said Brice Eymard, leader of France’s Provence Wine Council (CIVP) during a press conference in Paris on Thursday.
“Until 2010-2011, we exported very little, France was the main producer and consumer, but we now see the share of exports sharply accelerating,”  [ . . . }

Source: THE LOCAL Exports of rosé from Provence boom thanks to American wine lovers – The Local