Sip and Savor: Romancing the Rosé
Winemaker Amy Butler of Ranchero Cellars pours her 2015 Galaxie at Paso Underground tasting room. Photos by Mira Advani Honeycutt.
For Valentine’s Day drink pink
–Valentine’s Day is upon us and most of you are searching for a pricey bubbly to impress your amour. This year I suggest you pass over the sparkling wine and reach for a rosé.
LXV’s sensual Heart Note rosé is served with aphrodisiac tidbits.
There’s something romantic about a rosé wine. “What’s sexier than lobster and crab with rosé wine,” quips Amy Butler, owner/winemaker of Ranchero Cellars.
I’m on a mission to discover Paso Robles rosé wines. And lately, many wineries are jumping on the rosé bandwagon, producing rosés from Rhone and Bordeaux variety grapes.
A rosé wine evokes images of beautiful people on sun-drenched beaches of California’s Central Coast or the French Riviera where it’s not uncommon to spot the curvaceous wine bottles of Domaine Ott and Tavel in seaside cafes from Cannes to St. Tropez.
A true rosé will transport you to France’s Provence region. The traditional grape varietals used in this region can be blends of grenache, syrah, mourvédre, counois and cinsault. However, a rosé can be produced from any red grape — from cabernet sauvignon and merlot to sangiovese and tempranillo. And, of course, there’s the sparkling rosé made from pinot noir.
But rosé is not just a summer wine. Rosé’s versatility can make it special and celebratory on a cold Valentine’s evening, dining out or at home in front of the fireplace.
Fresh as a just picked bowl of berries, rosé’s light tannins balanced with bracing acidity makes it not only food-friendly but an ideal aperitif. Its taste and color profile can range from the austere French style in lighter shades to New World wines that tend to be deep crimson with concentrated strawberry flavors. Paso Robles presents both styles.
So what is rosé? No, it’s not red wine lightened with a splash of white (although some winemakers might add a smidgen of viognier when blending). Traditionally, rosé was a by-product of red wine production. Known as the saignée (French for bleeding) method, grape juice was partially “bled-off” or drained from the skins producing two batches of wine: the ‘bled-off’ juice was fermented as rosé with the juice still left on the skins going on to develop as red wine.
Although this method is still used by many winemakers, the now popular ‘maceration’ method is commonly used where rosé is the goal and not a byproduct. As in red wine production, here the juice of red grapes sits in contact with the skins for several hours or days, enough time to extract some of the phenols, pigments, and tannins, then drained and transferred to tanks for fermentation.
Butler follows the “maceration” method and picks her grapes early (at 19-20 brix) to concentrate the acidity. At Butler’s downtown Paso Robles tasting room, the Paso Underground, we tasted the 2015 Galaxie, a sensual salmon-hued wine that embraces you with aromas of just-picked strawberries. The wine, she noted, was, in fact, produced from dropped fruit in a vineyard.
Deeper Cass rosé in contrast with a salmon-shaded Clos Solene.
“I picked the fruit, counois and mourvedre, otherwise it would have been thrown away,” Butler commented. The grapes get minimal skin contact, a mere two hours to get that luminous pale hue.
Jordan Fiorentini, winemaker at Epoch Estate, follows the same minimal skin contact approach. With a nod to the Bandol-style rosé, the seductive 2015 Mourvedre-driven rosé is pale baby pink, perfumed with key lime notes.
At Windward Vineyards, vintner Marc Goldberg crafts his “secret stash,” limited production of Vin Gris de Pinot Noir in the maceration method. The pale salmon-shaded wine is rich and floral aromatic with rose petals.
Made from Tempranillo grapes, the 2015 ONX Indie rosé is evocative of fields of Provence. Clos Solene’s austere La Rose 2016 offers delicious traces of cantaloupe. Turtle Rock’s 2015 Willows Tickled Pink is a fragrant grenache rosé with fruit sourced from James Berry Vineyard.
Sculpterra’s 2015 Paso Pink is off-dry with a deep strawberry color as the juice is left overnight with skin contact to extract color and flavor. A blend of grenache, syrah and omurvedre, Cass winery’s 2016 Oasis offers fragrant notes of cantaloupe, and ruby red grapefruit.
Windward’s rose petal-perfumed Vin Gris de Pinot Noir.
Jacob Lovejoy, chef at Cass, has some rosé food pairing suggestions such as oysters, smoked salmon, scampi, crab cakes, seafood pasta or a fanciful strawberry fruit tart.
Other noteworthy rosé wine producers in Paso Robles include L’Aventure, Daou, Cypher, Adelaida, Anglim, Tablas Creek, Derby, Alta Colina, Circle B, Vina Robles, Victor Hugo, Ancient Peaks and Bella Luna.
Speaking of romance, at LXV’s seductive wine lounge in downtown Paso Robles, owners Neeta and Kunal Mittal are celebrating Valentine’s on Feb. 11, uncorking the 2016 Heart Note, a perfumy Sangiovese rosé paired with aphrodisiac tidbits.
So hop on the pink bandwagon and toast your Valentine with a romantic rosé.
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