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It’s a hot summer day, and you’re enjoying a well-deserved vacation. The sun is shining, there’s a light breeze blowing in off the Mediterranean. It’s lunchtime, so you take a table outside a small cafe and wonder what you should drink. Looking around you, you notice that at every table everyone is drinking…Rosé!

Rosé wines, dry, not sweet, are the “official” casual warm weather quaffs in winemaking countries all over the world…including, more and more, the United States. Crisp, aromatic, lively and flavorful, a cool glass of rosé goes with almost any of the foods we love to eat in summer: salads, sandwiches, cold cuts, a cold roasted chicken, fish, shrimp. It’s the wine to take along on a picnic, and the wine that can make any meal eaten with it seem like it is a picnic!

Rose wines are made in several ways. Usually, red grapes are pressed and their skins, which contain the pigment that gives the wine color, is allowed to soak in the juice before fermentation begins. This had the added benefit of allowing some tannins (found in the skins, seeds and stems of grapes) to also be absorbed into the juice. Tannins, natural preservatives, help to give wines balance, and prevent oxidation. The process of converting animal skins into leather is called tanning because it uses tannins to remove traces of fat and blood from the skins. Because red wines are made by fermenting the juice of the grapes along with the skins, they are higher in tannins than white wines, and are better matches with red meats. Rosé wines, having more tannins than white wines, will compliment lighter meats, or even cold roast beef.

Some Rosés are made by adding a bit of red wine to white. Most of the rosé Champagne on the market is made this way.

So, what about “blush wines”, like White Zinfandel? In spite of what the marketing departments say, these are rosé wines, made from the Zinfandel grape, a red varietal. It’s just a simpler tasting, sweeter version of the real thing.

©2007 Community Newspaper Group