Diary of a Shopkeeper, 22nd June
To celebrate midsummer, we held a tasting in the shop on Saturday of some favourite summery products: salty black olives, French saucisson flavoured with wild garlic, and three rosé wines. Clouds hid the sun most of the day, and the temperature barely rosé above 15 degrees, but – just as we’d hoped – food and drink from faraway southern places brought back memories, or conjured up dreams, of travels to the warm, gastronomically-blessed lands that border the Mediterranean.
Rosé wine has become so associated with warm weather that we hardly sell any in the cold months, but sales rise significantly in the summer. I think the habit of drinking it seasonally is one of its appeals. We don’t eat turkey every week, so by the time Christmas comes around we’re quite excited to be trying what is, in itself, not a particularly exciting bird. The same goes for rosé. Wine lovers overwhelmingly choose white or red wine for most of the year, based on their own preference or what they’re eating. But when balmier days arrive, a switch flips and our mouths start watering at the prospect of a glass of chilled pink.
What’s that you say? Rosé is often bland and not that exciting? Who cares! It’s summer: rosé rules!
I could be drummed out of the Wine Merchants’ Magic Circle for agreeing that rosé can be bland, but it’s true. I think it’s because so much of the wine’s appeal is visual: we tend to buy it because it’s pretty and pink, not because of how we think it’s going to taste. When customers ask about rosé, they’re usually interested in whether it’s dry or sweet. Anything else is too much information.
Which is exactly why we opened three different bottles yesterday for everyone to try.
Most visually appealing was Rising River’s Pinotage Rosé from Franschhoek in South Africa. It was a lovely light ruby in the glass, with attractive cherry aromas and a juicy, medium-bodied mouthfeel. It has just a touch of sweetness, not enough so you’d notice it unless you were looking for it, but enough to round out the wine and make it good for drinking by itself as well as with food. (£11.50 per bottle.)
Next up was Domaine Papagiannakos’s Granatus, from Attica, east of Athens. We brought this in a few months ago to use at our first ever Greek Lynnfield Lux, and I enjoyed it then with a selection of mezze, so it was good to try it again. The colour was an unusual bronze-pink, which reminded me of the Italian style known as ramato – coppery. The aroma and flavour were unusual. There was some redcurrant fruitiness from the Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, then a whole load of savoury herbal notes from the indigenous Greek variety, Agiorgitiko. It was far out on the taste spectrum. People who tried it liked it, but we all agreed it would really show its best with boldly flavoured food – feta cheese with chopped pickled chiles, roast vegetable salad, grilled lamb skewers. Not one to sip by itself, but potentially an excellent barbecue wine. (£19.50 per bottle.)
Finally, we poured what was by far the palest of these rosés. If you didn’t look closely, you might almost mistake it for a white, such was the lightness of its salmon pinkness. This was Pierre de Taille’s Coteaux d'Aix-en-Provence, from southern France. Provence rosés have – despite competition from around the world – dominated the European rosé market for decades, and this wine, a Grenache-dominated blend, demonstrated why. It had a delicate but attractive aroma of raspberries and strawberries. On the palate it was the driest of these three wines, with a long tongue-tingling finish. Beautifully refreshing by itself, it would also make a fantastic match for any kind of fried or grilled fish. (£15.50 per bottle.)
So, three different wines, all modestly priced, all pink, but differing significantly in style. The different grapes used in each bring different aromas and flavours, which are allowed to shine though by being fermented in steel tanks rather than oak barrels. The use of oak in rosé is vanishingly rare: the style is all about freshness and delicacy, so the weight and buttery texture oak brings is not welcome.
The other crucial choice made by winemakers is length of maceration. Red grapes are crushed, and the skins and juice are left in contact with each other while they start to ferment. For red wine this maceration lasts many days, even weeks, but for rosé – where far less of the colour contained in the skins is desired – maceration can be as brief as a couple of hours, and never longer than a day.
A minority of rosés are made using the saignée method – French for bleeding. When the winemaker starts to make a red wine, they bleed off some of the fermenting juice after just a few hours of skin contact. This juice is finished separately as rosé wine. This method has the advantage that the red wine remaining has extra concentration and power. The Granatus is made this way.
The right grapes, skilful handling in the winery, and it should all come together in a glass of irresistibly refreshing rosé. All we need now is some summer sunshine.
This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 27th June 2025. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.