The rise and rise of rosé

Both the Brits and the French are drinking more pink wine than ever - so what's its secret? Plus: what I've been drinking this week

Pink power: Kylie Minogue launches her Provence rosé, 2020; the reality of mass-market rosé production at Borsao, north-west Spain, with a one-million-litre tank

IT was inevitably headlined “The war of the rosés”. Last month the Times claimed that there is a row between the so-called “rosé aristocracy” of Provence and those Bordeaux winemakers now turning to paler styles of rosé in imitation of Provence’s pink money spinners. Provençal vignerons reportedly dismissed their competitors’ product as “swimming pool plonk”.

Call me a cynical old hack, but this sounds to me like a minor French wine story cleverly spun by to a British news editor – “it’s spring, people are gonna be out in their gardens drinking rosé”. (This is something that Times Paris correspondent Adam Sage does manage regularly.)

The real story here is the rise and rise of rosé – and that is certainly a market where French winemakers outside Provence want a bigger piece of the action.

Rosé consumption has climbed steadily in Britain: it’s now around 11 per cent of wine sales, although in the past 12 months sales have jumped 7.4 per cent, double the rate for other still wines. It’s easy wine, just there to be enjoyed: I’ve heard female drinkers refer to Famille Perrin’s widely-sold La Vieille Ferme Languedoc rosé as “chicken rosé” after its farmyard label. That’s a kind of familiarity hard to imagine in Britain for any red Bordeaux.

Paler Provence rosés have become especially popular, boosted by celebrity endorsement. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie make their Miraval rosé in the Var, while in 2020 Kylie Minogue launched her wine range with a Provençal pink. She has since supplemented it with a wildly successful rosé Prosecco, among other products: to date, her wines have sold more than 12 million bottles globally.

The even bigger rosé success story, however, is in France, itself easily the world’s biggest pink producer. Rosé sales have tripled in France in the past three decades, to around a third of the total: pink long ago overtook white, and could surpass domestic sales of red by the end of the decade (it already did during the hot spring and summer of 2022.) Far more than in Britain, in France, rosé is considered the taste of summer – especially when drunk as “rosé piscine” – with ice, ideally next to a swimming pool.

But this isn’t just a story about changing tastes. Provence rosé is a rare example of dynamism in the French mass wine sector. While rosé had long been a regional speciality, in the early 2000s, producers took a strategic decision to specialise in it. Over 90 per cent of Provençal production is now pink.

Co-operatives led the way in modernising production: for the fashionable paler styles of rosé especially, these are technically complex wines. They demand techniques such as night harvesting, to keep the grapes cool, and investment in winery cooling equipment and kit such as the Inertys system, a wine press with large bags of nitrogen attached, to keep out oxygen, thereby protecting flavour molecules.

Gavin Quinney, who makes chef Rick Stein’s house rosé at Château Bauduc in Bordeaux, says: “Provence did a fantastic job – they managed to get away from châteaux and domaines and broke free from that to make it a brand in itself.” He is less optimistic about Bordeaux pulling off the same trick.

This is the key point: rosé – especially from Provence – has floated free of traditional wine categorisations and become a lifestyle indicator, an aspirational brand.

Stephen Cronk, founder with his wife Jeany of the hugely successful Mirabeau brand, is forthright about this strategy. As he told The Buyer’s Richard Siddle in 2021, “Most people who do this buy a property and we realised we should do this the other way round and build a brand first.”

Mirabeau led the way in becoming a social media brand too, its Instagram feed an endless parade of floaty white dresses and lunches outdoors in the Provençal sunshine. And Mirabeau has innovated constantly in terms of product as well as marketing, putting wine in cans and also launching a gin brand, for instance.

Yet Cronk and his team don’t actually grow any of the grapes that go into Mirabeau: except for their prestige La Réserve cuvée from their own small vineyard, the rest is bought in from a dozen growers. They just maintain the house style. The same is true for Château d’Esclans’s Whispering Angel – now majority owned by luxury goods behemoth LVMH – which retails at well over £20 retail in the UK, as well as for brand leaders such as M de Minuty, and of course Kylie Minogue’s Côtes de Provence.

The success of Kylie in particular is regarded with sniffiness by many in the wine world. But it really comes down to whether we want mass market wines that are popular - and to what the wine industry should do to prosper in the face of changing tastes. After all, the main reason that consumption of rosé is set to surpass that of red in France is the latter’s precipitous decline: rosé sales have risen steadily but not meteorically. 

And in a region such as Bordeaux, where thousands of small producers of fairly cheap red wine are threatened by the change in public tastes, if vignerons can make a living and keep making wine by switching to “rosé piscine” - well, why not?

Tasting rosé

So are the new generation of rosés any good? At a blind tasting of 28 pink wines from Provence and Bordeaux organised last year by the Revue du Vin de France, the country’s premier wine magazine, a group of distinguished tasters found it tricky telling which wines came from which region. Their scores also didn’t bear much relation to price: they rated supermarket plonk Mouton Cadet rosé (price €5.11) sixth, well of ahead of Whispering Angel (in seventeenth place.)

I recently conducted a slightly less rigorous test with my friend Victoria Moore, the Telegraph’s wine critic: we tasted around 14 samples she’d called in (she later tasted many more, around 90 in all, for her recent rosés piece: that’s dedication.) It reminded me why I stopped going to supermarket press tastings – my notes are full of technical comments like “bit blah” - but it was interesting to see the emergence of a mass-market rosé style across several countries. The following is the wine we both liked best, followed by a couple of my own go-to cheaper rosés.

Specially Selected Côteaux de Béziers Rosé 2023 (Aldi, £8.49) – very pale, a Languedoc rosé posing as Provençal, this Grenache/Cinsault blend has pleasant, slightly peppery red fruit. Smooth and moreish.

Waitrose Ripe and Juicy Spanish Rosé (£5.49) – this is made for Waitrose by Borsao, a group of wine cooperatives in Campo de Borja, north-west Spain. I visited earlier this year and it’s an impressive operation, including the largest stainless steel tank I’ve ever seen (a million litres) and a bottling line that can do 10,000 bottles an hour. This is in part how they manage to produce such a remarkable bargain: this Garnacha is indeed ripe and juicy - and with a little more weight than some paler styles. I’m certainly not going to argue with this on a hot day.

Ste Eulalie Minervois Rosé 2023 (The Wine Society, £9.95) – Another deeper-coloured rosé, I like this because it has more red fruit flavour and weight than a lot of pink wines – ideal for standing up to summer barbecues.

Photo: vecteezy.com

What I’ve been drinking this week

Sellas “Rizes” Assyrtiko/Roditis 2022, Peloponnese - a pretty typical Peloponnese white, fresh and clean with a little bit of breadth, and a touch more acidity than some because of the use of Assyrtiko. The blend of this wine appears to vary from year to year: sometimes they blend with Moschofilero, more typical of the area than Assyrtiko. I drank this at Borough Market’s brilliant new Greek-influenced Oma restaurant, which boasts one of the best Greek wine lists in town (Kudos Wines, £12.)

Château Mont-Redon Lirac 2021 - Mont-Redon is best known as a top producer of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, but like some other Châteauneuf houses, they also own vines just a few kilometres west on the left bank of the Rhône, in Lirac. It won’t have the staying power of the Châteauneuf but it’s a brilliant southern Rhône red in an essentially similar style (70 per cent Grenache, the rest Syrah and Mourvedre): dark berry fruit, herbal notes, plush depth and power (was £14 from The Wine Society en primeur but doesn’t appear to be available retail there or anywhere else yet. Vinum has the excellent 2019 at £19.90; that and the 2020 are available elsewhere in bond.)

Château Coutet 2014, Barsac - I love the way that in Barsac the wines’ sweetness is cut with a firmer streak of acidity than in neighbouring Sauternes: this First Growth is one of my favourites. Elegant yet luscious; so complex and so long. This is good value for a wine of this seriousness and quality, especially in a half bottle as I drank it (Sandham’s Wine Merchants, £36.95/75ml; widely available in bond, as are other vintages.)

• Transparency declaration: I visited Borsao as a guest of the company and DO Campo de Borja. The Aldi rosé and all the others I tasted with Victoria Moore were free samples from retailers.