Rosé wines

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Wine

By Jancis Robinson

Published 2006

  • About

rosé wines, increasingly popular wines in any shade of pink, from hardly perceptible to pale red (see colour). For some reason they are rarely known as pink wines, although the English word blush has been adopted for particularly pale rosés. There was also a fashion in California, from the late 1980s, when wine had to be white to be popular, to label pale pink wines made from dark-skinned grapes White, as in white zinfandel (which has spawned a host of supposedly White wines made from such darkly coloured grape varieties as Cabernet, Merlot, Grenache, and Barbera). Global production of rosé wines in 2011 was 24.1 million hl/637 million gal, up from 22.2 million hl in 2002.