Rosé: Understanding the pink wine revolution - Elizabeth Gabay MW

A new book on rosé wine by Elizabeth Gabay MW

Wine comes in two colours, right? Red and white.

No wait, vin jaune is yellow, Madeira is amber and sherry can be brownish; Champagne is kind of mushroomy and then there are orange wines.

And actually red wine isn't generally red - more often purplish or cherry-coloured. White wine is certainly not white but covers the spectrum from greenish to yellow.

And we don't use an English word for pink wine but call it rosé instead - including an accent and an extra syllable to differentiate it from the accent-less flower by any other name. Pink / rosé wine is perhaps the only wine colour style that meets its description; it genuinely is pink, even if it comes in a range of shades.

It may seem quaint or old-fashioned to write about the entire topic of wine of a certain colour, yet as Liz notes in her introduction, rosé wine has benefited over the last twenty-five years from a boom in quality and production volume, so a re-appraisal of this "ugly duckling" among wine styles is overdue.

Exploring ‘unicorn’ rosés, largely unknown, unreported and unrecognized and often difficult to find, remaining hidden to most consumers, Liz starts with the question ‘What is a rosé?’, something that sounds simple enough, but for which she finds there are numerous exceptions.

Subsequent chapters cover the history of rosé wine, viticulture and winemaking, and rosé regions from Provence to other classic French regions via North America, the southern hemisphere, pink sparkling wine and the rest of Europe including the Balkans, the Adriatic and the eastern Mediterranean before addressing the business of rosé.

The book concludes that formerly an ugly ducking, rosé is now emerging as a beautiful swan in a dynamic revolution that is only just beginning.

Available from Amazon, priced £30

Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Infinite Ideas Limited (15 Jan. 2018)