Rosé Champagne – Choosing Your Favourite

At The Finest Bubble, we drink different wines in summer to winter – when the sun is out (and let’s face it, that’s not too often here in the UK); we steer clear of heavy, hearty reds and turn to delicate rosé or crisp white wine…preferably with bubbles!

With rosé in 2014 accounting for 8.4 percent of total champagne shipments – a number that has been steadily growing for the last 10 years – it seems we love our rosé in the UK. Consumers have been drinking more pink champagne this century than at any other time in history and so we turn the spotlight onto how it’s made and what to look for in your rosé. We take the view that a rosé is best when there are distinct red fruit characteristics and not just colour, since many are barely pink and taste like “white” champagnes. We have picked a small range of rosé’s that have enough of that character from the Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier grapes to make them distinctly different to their blanc siblings.

 

When making ‘white’ champagne, producers have to press the dark-skinned grapes carefully so as to minimise colour coming from the skins – you want the aromas and flavours these red grapes bring, just not the colour. When making red wine, the colour is extracted by prolonged contact with the skins during fermentation. When making rosé still wine it’s the same process but for a much shorter period on the skins. In rosé champagne, you do want the colour as well as the aromas and flavours of the Pinot grapes and this is typically achieved by adding red wine. Rosé champagne is made as if it were a blanc champagne and then after its first fermentation the red wine, typically 15-18 per cent, is added to the blend (assemblage) prior to its bottling. The bottles then go off to rest in the chalk cellars where it’s quite cool (9-13°C) for the second, in bottle fermentation to slowly take place.