The question: “What is a ROSÉ?”

An answer: “A wine of varying shades of pink.”

But what do you really need to know to appreciate these wines at a tasting?  The varying methods of production that make these wines look that way.

There are six techniques to create both old world and new world rosé wine:

1. Transitory Maceration(short term skin contact): When the principal goal of the winemaker is to create a blush colored wine. The dark skinned grapes are crushed and left in contact with unfermented juice called “must” for 24 hours or less. The longer the maceration period the darker the rosé. Due to the lack of extracted compounds rosé wines will have less stable color, potential flavor components and oxygen protection. This is why rosé should be consumed young and not aged in your cellar.
2. Saignée (partial separation from juice): Grapes are crushed and put into tanks, and a short while later, a small percentage of the juice is siphoned off. The French word Saignée means to “Bleed” from the vat. The juice in the main tank continues on in the production of a red wine. The siphoned juice will be used in filing up the shrinkage and short-fills of barrels, or made into a rosé wine.
3. Doble Pasta/Ripasso(complete separation from skins): By removing of the pressed cake or “Pomace,” (the sweet dark mass of grape skins, stems, seeds, and pulp from a recently pressed rosé) and combining the cake into a red in production, the latter wines will become more hedonistic. The rosés, with less time on the skins, will be of a light, fruity style.
4. Vin Gris(no skin contact): This method is used when only the lightest of color is wanted in creating a Rosé. The fresh extracted juice is immediately separated from the recently pressed skins, seeds and stems as to keep it from extracting any pigment.  This method makes wine far lighter in color than all other Rosés.
5. Pigment Unification(blending white and red grapes): This method is very uncommon and is considered to be a cheap and inferior way of producing a rosé colored wine. However in Champagne France, it is not only acceptable, but is the most common way to create Rosé Champagne.
6. Decolorization(stripping color by use of filtration): The use of absorbent activated carbon charcoal to rid wine of color pigmentation. Implementing this technique will certainly strip wines of any subtle nuances that would generally lend to a more complex rosé. This is good reason as to why decolorazation is rarely used in the production of quality rosé.

That’s it. I’m guessing that most of the rosés we drink will be of the 1^stand 2^ndmethods. I could be wrong though. Either way, feel free to ask Bryan which method was used on any given wine. I believe that he has them all memorized!