This month's topic is wide open. You're welcome to bring rosé wine from anywhere around the world, ranging from just off-white to nearly-red and every shade of pink in between. Open, taste and talk about it ... and be sure to let us know in particular when you catch one that's good enough to share.
Just for fun, here's an essay on pink wines that I wrote back in the early summer of 2002. I haven't changed my opinions much since then ...
Recalibrating for Rosé
It's all too easy to dismiss pink wine. Just ask my wife.
"It's not worth the bother," she says, arguing that rosé wine resembles nothing so much as watered-down red, lacking even the saving graces of steel or stone that elevate the best whites. The best pink wine you ever tasted is probably not all that much better than the worst, she insists.
Well, maybe.
Rosé wine hasn't enjoyed the greatest reputation in modern times. Perhaps influenced by the lack of snob appeal of American White Zinfandel, a wine known as modest, simple and usually quite sweet, the marketplace seems to dismiss all pink wines as uninteresting and forgettable.
But every year around this time, when heat and humidity start to lie like a heavy wool blanket over much of the Northern Hemisphere, the idea of a crisp, refreshing pink wine starts to sound appealing.
As I reported last summer around this same point, now is the time to "recalibrate" our palates toward pink wines in the Mediterranean tradition - rosés from Provence, the Rhone and Languedoc in France, pink Rosato from Italy and Rosado from Spain, not to mention wines made in a similar style from the U.S. and Australia. These bone-dry, freshly fruity and crisp wines offer just about everything you would want in a summer sipper. They're refreshing when served well chilled, and they go very well with dinner salads and light summer fare.
The best rosés are made from red wine grapes, but the grape skins (which contain all the color) are taken out of the fermenting vessel before they have time to impart much color to the wine. The result is a wine that varies from the palest pink to copper or salmon hues, a range of color that the French describe with a bewildering array of names from "vin gris" ("gray wine") to "oeil de perdrix" ("partridge eye") to "pelure d'oignon" ("onion skin").
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