Time to drink the pink

TASTING pink wines used to be a struggle. Not any more – rosés have got drier and finer as a happy consequence of the continuing British boom in pink wine. Sales have doubled since 2005, compared with the pathetic six per cent annual growth that the whole wine sector musters.

Given that, at long last, the world’s winemakers are treating rosés seriously, I should not have been surprised that my pink wine tasting success rate this summer was far higher than that achieved for either whites or reds. Roughly 10 per cent of the 10,000 wines I taste annually come through as winners, but around a third of the pinks got my vote.

True, I weeded out the worst of the unbelievably sticky, evil California blush and white zinfandel pinks, with their 35g of residual sugar per litre, before I started, and was relieved that the likes of Torres’s clean but cloying Ribena-esque 2007 Santa Digna Cabernet Rosé from Chile were in the minority.

Other pink wine pitfalls to avoid are those confected blue-pink rosés and those that have a washed-out, dirty, tawny oxidised hue. Pink wines, lacking the acidity of white wines and the fruit and structure of reds, are more fragile, so check out how your rosé has been stored before you buy.

Above all, make certain you buy a young, vibrant, fresh-as-a-daisy vin de l’année pink, remembering that French rosé and other northern hemisphere pinks are under a year old, while southern hemisphere 2007s, with their harvest in March, are over a year old and tiring.