Hi, I am Andrew from OYA Restaurant & Lounge in Washington D.C., and today we are discussing tips from a sommelier. In this clip, I am going to be discussing rosé wine and hopefully help you to gain a better understanding.
Now, rosé is not your granny‘s White Zinfandel. White Zinfandel for sure is a rosé but definitely not a dry rosé, which I am going to be discussing with you here. When I use the word dry, dry is a term usually used to denote the fact that there is no residual sweetness in a wine. So, if a wine is described as dry then it’s not sweet.
Now what is rosé? As you can see, I have a number of rosés in front of me they have various colors from sort of light salmon all the way up to sort of a very almost like a light red wine, if you will. But rosé is a wine made from red grapes and it usually starts out in one of two ways. You’ll have your red grapes and you’ll bring them into your winery and you’ll go ahead and you are crushing them because all red pigmented wines get their color from the skins of the grapes, not from the juice because the juice is generally white. There are a few exceptions to that but generally speaking, red grapes have white juice. The color comes from soaking the skins in the juice.
So you’ve crushed your grapes, you leave the skins and they’re soaking and some of the pigment is coming out. You can either, if you’re deciding to make a rosé, you might go ahead and remove all the skins, after say, maybe eight to 12 hours depending on the intensity and the depth of color that you are looking for and also the fruit flavors that you’re trying to extract from the skins. Some other wineries, when making rosé wine, start out making a red wine. They’ve crush the grapes, the skins and the juice are soaking and say eight to 12 hours into it, they actually remove some of the juice that has a bit of a pink color and some of the flavors and aromatics from the skins. That leaves the skins and the remaining juice to go on to be a red wine and it will be much more complex red wine because some of the liquid had been reduced so you have more skin contact for the remaining juice and the pink colored juice that was extracted off and was sent off to be made into rosé, will go into a process similar to that used to make white wine. Usually going through stainess steel tank fermentation and then goes onto be bottled and sold.
So, one thing that I always tell our guests here in the restaurant, is that rosé is a great food wine. It’s very food friendly, it makes a great stand-in when you might have a dish where a white wine just won’t stand up but a red wine would definitely be too overpowering and rosé makes a nice standing. Generally, these wines have a lot of red fruit flavors, pink raspberries, strawberries, sometimes there is a little bit of spice, sometimes there’s also a little bit of sweetness. I have a wide range of rosés here in front of me. I have a Cabernet Sauvignon based rosé from Virginia, I have a Pinot Noir rosé, champagne actually from France, have here another Cabernet rosé as you could see a little bit of darker color. So a little more skin contact there with the red skins, this one is from Australia, a Cabernet Grenache Blend rosé from Spain and the final one, which I know you are thinking doesn’t even look like a rosé, this is actually from a winery close to us here in Virginia, this is the Chrysalis Patio Red rosé made from the Norton grape, which has a very, very heavily pigmented skin and this is what a rosé from Norton looks like, almost like a light red wine. Some of the regions of the world where you definitely will find good rosé, the South of France, also Italy, there is some amazing Malbec rosés, being made in Argentina and as well as California and other parts of the US, Washington State make some wonderful rosés. I hope you enjoyed knowing a little bit about rosé wine today, thanks for watching.
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