Rosé has gone from punchline to powerhouse, and Tony Aspler explains why the world keeps drinking pink
Back in the day, real men didn’t eat quiche.
And we would rather be seen wearing an apron at the kitchen sink than be caught holding a glass of rosé.
Pink wines were for girls. For men, these pretty wines were neither fish, nor fowl, nor good red herring.
For the 2023-24/2025 period, rosé wine sales in Canada dropped by 3% in value and 7% in volume, following a peak in the 2021-22 period.
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But globally they’re exploding. The world market for rosé was valued at USD 10.78 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach USD 13.6 billion by 2032, exhibiting a category growth rate of 3.3% during the forecast period.
The market’s growth is primarily driven by increasing consumer preference for lighter, refreshing wines, especially in regions with warmer climates. The rise of outdoor dining and social gatherings post-pandemic has also contributed to higher consumption, and changing consumer preferences.
Mateus is still a very popular Portuguese brand for its blush colour and semi-sweet refreshing taste.
How times have changed. A research study by VinExpo on international wine trends found that the consumption of rosé wines in Canada shot up 38% between 2007 and 2012. And this wasn’t just women drinking them. The Vinexpo study forecasts even greater growth of 45.5% between 2014 and 2016. Admittedly this is from a small base, but these growth numbers are impressive.
There are some wine regions that take rosé seriously – Tavel, across the Rhône River from Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and Bandol, east of Marseilles, for example, and the commune of Marsannay in Burgundy – but for the most part rosé is a by-product of red winemaking. And it’s an ideal wine for cool climate regions, like Ontario, where black grapes don’t necessarily ripen every year. (I just bought a case of Malivoire’s Moira Rosé 2024 for my Summer drinking.)
The world market for rosé is projected to reach USD 13.6 billion by 2032.
Apart from a few teinturier varieties that yield deeply coloured juice, most wine grapes deliver clear, white juice. If this juice is fermented without contact with the skins it will produce a white wine. You may have seen champagne labelled Blanc de Noirs which means a white wine made from pinot noir and pinot meunier – both black grapes.
To make red wine winemakers must macerate the skins of black grapes with the juice.
The acid in the juice breaks down the cells in the skins and releases colour. (It also releases tannins and resveratrol but that’s another story.)
If winemakers leave the skins in contact with the fermenting juice for 12 to 24 hours, depending on the variety, they will make a pink wine; a week or two weeks’ contact will produce a deeply coloured red wine.
But in cool climate regions, winemakers may want to intensify the colour of their red wines by bleeding off liquid during the fermentation process to create a higher ratio of skins to juice. What they bleed off will be rosé wine. This technique is known as saignée, from the French term, bleeding (which sounds more appealing than its French synonym, phlébotomie).
National Rosé Day is celebrated annually on the second Saturday in June.
There are three ways to make rosé – skin contact for a short time, bleeding off juice from vats during traditional fermentation, or by blending red wine with white to reach the desired shade of pink. An example of this latter method (frowned upon in Europe) is Henry of Pelham’s Pink House Wine Company Chardonnay Merlot. As its label tells you in all honesty, the wine is a blend of chardonnay and merlot.
This method is outlawed in France but – and there is always a ‘but’ in French wine law – the practice of cutting white wine with red is permitted for the production of rosé champagne. Although some champagne houses still use the saignée process, most of them now blend red and white wines because it’s much easier that way to reach a consistent pink color from vintage to vintage.
There is a huge range of colours for rosé wines from the palest onion skin and a grey-pink shade the French call l’oeil-de-perdrix (eye of the partridge) to different hues of salmon, amber and orange to pale, light and deep ruby. There is no regulation that governs what colour a rosé should be, merely a descriptor after the fact. The Conseil Interprofessionnel des Vins de Provence has made a brave stab at producing a scale. The bureaucrats have determined the six main colours of rosé wines made in their region. Each colour refers to a fruit: Gooseberry, Peach, Grapefruit, Cantaloupe, Mango and Mandarin (see http://www.
Ontario makes delicious Rosé wines in all forms, including sparkling rosé.
With the range of colours goes a range of tastes and styles. The black grape used will determine part of the taste profile, but its ultimate flavour will rest on the amount of residual sugar left in the wine. European rosés are generally drier than New World rosés with Blush wines being the sweetest.
Blush entered the wine lexicon in 1972 when Sutter Hill winemaker Bob Trinchero had a problem with his California Zinfandel. The fermentation stuck, leaving the wine a pale color with a high percentage of unfermented sugar. Since rosé was a moribund category, Trinchero marketed his mistake as a ‘blush wine’ called White Zinfandel. Sales in 1980 were 25,000 cases. Four years later Sutter Home White Zin soared to 1.5 million cases.
