Best Pink Wines: 3 Rosés to try before you die

Pink wine, more commonly known as rosé, has enjoyed something of a renaissance over the last two decades. But it’s been around for much, much longer than that. From frivolous holiday wine to serious food companion — drunk by international men of mystery, no less — and even age-worthy meditation wine deserving of space in the cellar, rosé covers a surprisingly broad spectrum. If you don’t have any pink wine on your wine bucket list, you most definitely should. Here are three every wine lover should try before they die.

1. Côtes de Provence Rosé

Provence didn't invent rosé, but it certainly invented the style that has taken over the world: very pale, very dry, very fresh and very easy to drink. Provence-style rosé is now ubiquitous in wine regions across the globe. Everyone should try the original at least once.

2. Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo

If Provence taught us that good rosé should be pale, Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo politely suggests we forget that lesson. Made from Montepulciano, it can be almost red in colour, with cherries, herbs, structure and enough substance to sit comfortably at the dinner table.

3. An Age-Worthy Rosé

Most rosé is made to be drunk young. Some isn't. Bottles such as López de Heredia Viña Tondonia Rosado, Château Simone, Clos Cibonne and Domaine Tempier can develop for years — sometimes decades — proving that serious rosé can be every bit as fascinating with age as serious red or white wine.

Where to start

Start with Provence.

Not because it is necessarily the greatest rosé on this list, but because it is the reference point against which almost every modern dry rosé seems to be judged. Find a good Côtes de Provence, chill it, and drink it with lunch on a warm day. There is a reason this style became extraordinarily successful.

Then find a bottle of Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo. Put the two wines beside one another and they scarcely look like members of the same family. That is exactly the point.

Finally, seek out a rosé that has either been deliberately made for ageing or has already spent a few years in bottle. López de Heredia's Viña Tondonia Rosado Gran Reserva would be the ultimate bucket-list example if you can find and afford one, but Château Simone, Clos Cibonne and Domaine Tempier are other names worth knowing.

Three bottles. Three completely different ideas about what pink wine can be.

Why these three pink wines?

There are plenty of excellent rosés that could have made this list. Tavel, Bandol, Rosado from Spain, Cabernet d'Anjou and numerous New World examples all have a case.

But this isn't supposed to be an encyclopaedia. It's a bucket list.

These three tell the story particularly well.

Côtes de Provence represents the modern rosé revolution. Its pale colour, dryness, freshness and Mediterranean image became so successful that producers from Central Coast, California, to Central Otago, New Zealand, began making wines that looked suspiciously Provençal.

Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo is the antidote. It is darker, more structured and more obviously vinous. Drink one after a very pale Provence rosé and it becomes immediately obvious how silly it is to judge the quality of rosé by colour alone.

And age-worthy rosé attacks perhaps the biggest assumption of all: that pink wine is inherently simple and should be consumed within months of the vintage.

Together, they take rosé from the swimming pool to the dinner table and then on to the cellar.

Was rosé always pale?

Not remotely.

In fact, trying to divide older wines neatly into today's categories of red, white and rosé can become surprisingly difficult.

An English wine book published as far back as 1830 described several southern French wines — including Tavel — as red wines with a “bright rose tint.” What we now recognise as the boundary between red and rosé was clearly rather fuzzier.

For most of wine history, colour was not controlled with anything approaching the precision available to a modern winemaker. Grapes were crushed, pressed and fermented using local traditions and whatever equipment happened to be available. Some wines from red grapes were dark. Others were remarkably pale.

The idea that rosé should occupy a narrow band of fashionable salmon-pink is very modern.

And Provence had an awful lot to do with it.

James Bond drank rosé too

Rosé's modern image as a poolside drink — and, at times, a drink marketed disproportionately towards women — can make it seem as though people only recently started taking pink wine seriously.

James Bond apparently didn't get the memo.

In Ian Fleming's 1959 novel Goldfinger, Bond stops at a station restaurant in Orléans while following Goldfinger through France. He orders oeufs cocotte à la crème, sole meunière and Camembert and drinks a “well-iced pint” of Rosé d'Anjou, finishing with a Hennessy alongside his coffee.

It's only a tiny detail in the novel, but a revealing one.

This is not a holiday wine. Bond is working. It is not being presented as a wine “for the ladies”. And it certainly isn't being drunk by itself beside a swimming pool. Fleming puts chilled rosé squarely on the lunch table alongside classic French food. And Fleming, as his books and biographies reveal, knew a thing or two about food and drink.

The wine wasn't from Provence — it was Rosé d'Anjou from the Loire — but the scene is a nice reminder that chilled pink wine had a perfectly legitimate place at the table long before Instagram discovered it.

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Goldfinger by Ian Fleming — Amazon

Fleming's novel was first published in 1959.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man by Nicholas Shakespeare — Amazon

An in-depth look at Fleming’s life, which included plenty of fine dining and drinking.

How Provence became rosé country

One of the most interesting things about the Provence rosé story is that the famous modern “rosé revolution” didn't begin with Provence suddenly deciding to make pink wine.

It was already making plenty of it.

By 1974, roughly two-thirds of Côtes de Provence production was rosé — today it is around 90%. Contemporary sources from the early 1980s show that rosé was clearly the appellation's dominant colour long before Whispering Angel, Instagram or the modern obsession with barely-there pink.

Côtes de Provence vineyard overlooking the Mediterranean Sea near Saint-Tropez

Côtes de Provence vineyards near Saint-Tropez with the Mediterranean beyond | © barmalini / stock.adobe.com. Resized for web.

But it wasn't necessarily prestigious.

A wonderful 1984 Le Monde article captures the problem. Provence rosé had become associated with the great summer migration south and acquired a reputation as a vin de vacances — a holiday wine. The article sets about defending it against the idea that rosé was merely a little bastard wine to be served ice-cold.

That old insult may actually contain part of the secret of Provence's eventual success.

Was the holiday factor responsible for Provence rosé?

I suspect it was a very important part of the story.

It is tempting to explain Provence's dominance by saying that its terroir is somehow uniquely suited to rosé. Provence certainly has plenty going for it: abundant sunshine, dry Mediterranean conditions, cooling influences such as the Mistral, and grape varieties including Grenache, Cinsault, Mourvèdre and Tibouren that can make superb pink wine.

But none of those things makes great rosé possible only in Provence. Plenty of other places make excellent rosé. Some arguably make better rosé.

Provence also makes very good red wine. Bandol rather spectacularly proves that.

The more interesting explanation is probably demand.

The Côte d'Azur became one of Europe's great holiday destinations. Warm weather, seafood, terraces, beaches and long lunches created almost ideal circumstances for drinking a cool, refreshing local wine. As more visitors arrived, producers had a ready market for rosé. More rosé was made. Producers became better at making it. The region increasingly became associated with it.

There is a lovely passage in André Simon's 1919 Wine and Spirits that describes the underlying phenomenon, although he was writing about Italy rather than Provence. Simon observed how extraordinarily delicious a light local wine could seem when fetched from a cool cellar and drunk on a scorching summer day — and how disappointing that very same wine might seem when brought home to England.

More than a century later, anyone who has brought a bottle home from a Mediterranean holiday will understand exactly what he meant.

The evidence we've found so far doesn't justify saying that tourism caused Provence rosé. Rosé existed there long before mass tourism. But the emerging history strongly suggests that tourism helped turn an existing local wine into the region's dominant product.

Terroir made good rosé possible. The holidaymakers helped make it profitable.

Why rosé makes commercial sense

There is another, considerably less romantic, reason winemakers — and their accountants — might like making young rosé.

Money.

A fresh Provence-style rosé harvested in late summer can be fermented, bottled and on sale by the following spring. A more serious red from the same vintage might still be sitting in barrel or tank for another year or longer.

That can mean getting the rosé to market a good 12–18 months before the red.

There are a lot of upfront costs in winemaking, so getting a wine out the door just six months after harvest can do that rarest of things: make a winery's bean counter smile. Bottles leaving the cellar mean invoices being paid, wages being covered and money arriving in the bank while slower-maturing wines are still tying up capital.

For smaller family domaines and co-operatives in particular, a wine that can be made, sold and paid for relatively quickly has obvious appeal.

Sunshine may sell the rosé. Cash flow helps keep the winery running.

The rosé revolution

Then something important happened.

Instead of merely accepting rosé as the region's cheerful holiday wine, Provence began taking it increasingly seriously.

One of the key figures was Régine Sumeire. In 1985 she experimented with pressing whole Grenache grapes in a hydraulic Champagne-style press at Château Barbeyrolles. The resulting wine was extraordinarily pale. She called it Pétale de Rose. The first experimental production was tiny, but the wine found an enthusiastic audience around Saint-Tropez.

Other producers were reading the market too. At Château Minuty, the Matton family noticed that consumers particularly liked pale, light rosés and adapted their winemaking accordingly.

Better presses, temperature-controlled fermentation, harvesting during the cooler parts of the day and improved protection from oxygen allowed winemakers to make paler, fresher and more aromatic wines with increasing precision.

In 1999 Provence went one step further and established the Centre du Rosé, a research centre devoted specifically to pink wine. That tells you something rather important: rosé was no longer simply the wine left somewhere between the red and white tanks. Producers were deliberately studying how to make it better.

Then came premiumisation and international expansion. Château d'Esclans, acquired by Sacha Lichine in 2006, took Provençal rosé into price brackets previously considered faintly ridiculous for pink wine. Whispering Angel became enormously successful; Garrus demonstrated just how expensive and ambitious rosé could become.

The old vin de vacances had gone global.

From holiday wine to Instagram wine

Perhaps the cleverest part of the whole transformation was that Provence never entirely abandoned the image people once used to belittle it.

Sunshine. Holidays. Long lunches. Mediterranean beaches. Cold pink wine.

Instead, Provence turned them into selling points.

For decades, being dismissed as a “holiday wine” had been rosé's problem. Then social media arrived and turned it into one of rosé's greatest commercial assets.

Pale Provence rosé was almost absurdly Instagram-friendly: pink, cold, photogenic and already associated with beaches, terraces, Saint-Tropez, yachts, sunsets and summer holidays. Hashtags such as #RoséAllDay, #SummerWater and #YesWayRosé helped turn a growing wine category into a lifestyle.

Glass of pale Provence rosé overlooking a Mediterranean marina

Pale rosé overlooking a Mediterranean marina in Provence | © barmalini / stock.adobe.com. Resized for web.

Elizabeth Gabay MW has made much the same observation: rosé's colour is exceptionally photogenic for social media, particularly alongside sea, sunsets and the glamorous summer imagery with which the wine had already become associated.

Instagram didn't start the rosé revolution.

But it poured petrol on it.

And there is a wonderful irony here.

In 1984, the Provence wine industry was trying to convince people that its rosé was more than a holiday wine.

Thirty years later, social media helped make being a holiday wine one of its greatest assets.

The stigma became the brand.

But pale doesn't mean better

There was an unintended consequence.

Provence became so successful that the appearance of Provence rosé started being confused with the definition of quality rosé.

Paler became better.

It isn't.

Colour tells you something about grape variety and winemaking, but surprisingly little about whether the wine is actually any good.

Which brings us to Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo.

Cerasuolo means something close to cherry-red, and the wine lives up to its name. Made from Montepulciano in Abruzzo, it may receive only a relatively short period of skin contact, yet the grape contains enough colour to produce a rosé dramatically darker than fashionable Provence pink.

Bottle and glass of deep-coloured Cerasuolo d'Abruzzo rosé made from Montepulciano

2007 Montepulciano d'Abruzzo Cerasuolo, showing the style's deep pink-red colour | © e_calamar / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. Resized for web.

That colour comes with flavour and structure. Good Cerasuolo can have cherries, red berries, herbs, spice, acidity and even a little tannin. It is rosé that doesn't desperately want you to think it is white wine.

If Provence shows how refined and delicate rosé can be, Cerasuolo shows how much we lose when we decide that all rosé should look the same.

Gabay is particularly good on this point. Rather than defining rosé by colour, she argues that vinification is more useful: pink wines can range from the almost colourless examples of Provence to deeply coloured Cerasuolo.

Rosé doesn't necessarily have to be young either

The other great rosé commandment is: drink it young.

For most bottles, that's perfectly sensible advice. Fresh fruit and freshness are the point.

But it isn't a law.

Some of the world's most fascinating rosés are deliberately made with more structure and given extended maturation before release.

López de Heredia's Viña Tondonia Rosado Gran Reserva is perhaps the glorious extreme. Made from Garnacha, Tempranillo and Viura, it spends around four years in barrel before release and can continue developing for years in bottle.

Château Simone in Palette makes a deep, complex rosé using old vines and maturation in wood. Clos Cibonne famously ages its Tibouren-based rosé in large old foudres. Domaine Tempier produces Bandol rosé with Mourvèdre at its heart that can gain considerable complexity in bottle.

With age, the obvious fresh fruit begins to recede and more savoury, nutty, spicy, dried-fruit and earthy characters can emerge.

Elizabeth Gabay MW, who has probably done more than anyone to challenge simplistic ideas about rosé, has tasted dry pink wines several decades old and argues that good examples can develop far beyond the customary one-summer drinking window.

You don't need to start cellaring every supermarket rosé for twenty years.

But you should taste a genuinely age-worthy one at least once.

Pink wine deserves to be taken seriously — but not too seriously

Perhaps rosé has suffered because it is so easy to enjoy.

Wine people are suspicious of that.

We are much more comfortable taking a wine seriously if it comes with a difficult-to-pronounce vineyard, twenty months in expensive oak and instructions not to touch it until 2038.

Rosé often turns up cold, on a sunny afternoon, and disappears rather rapidly.

That's hardly its fault.

Ian Fleming was happily putting chilled rosé alongside sole meunière and Camembert in 1959. Provence subsequently demonstrated that uncomplicated pleasure can become a global phenomenon. Cerasuolo shows that pink wine can have genuine substance. And the great age-worthy rosés demonstrate that it can also possess complexity, longevity and ambition.

You don't have to choose between serious wine and fun wine.

Sometimes they are the same bottle.

Remember ... life is short, drink better. Drink the best. Discover more of the world’s best wines.

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