Temp Note: This wine should be chilled to about 50ºF (Pop it in the fridge for about 3 hours and take it out 10 minutes prior to serving.)
About the Wine: This Languedoc rosé is the result of gentle extraction of quality grapes. The wine exhibits a soft, pale-pink color with fruity aromas of summer fruits, rose, and hints of grapefruit. It is fresh, balanced palate makes it perfect as an aperitif or paired with shellfish and subtly spiced dishes. The bottom of the bottle is shaped as a rose, designed by a creative young designer from the Ecole Boulle, a college of fine arts in Paris.
Rosé Winemaking
There are 3 main methods for making rosé wine: blending, short maceration, and bleeding.
Blending: This is simply the taking a base white wine and a base red wine and blending them together. This method is considered inferior and is prohibited in the EU, though only for wines below a certain designation. Still the vast majority of rose appellations do not allow for the method. The notable exception is Champagne.
Short Maceration: Red grapes are crushed and are allow to briefly macerate in order to impart flavors and color. The color of the final wine depends on how long the skins remained on the juice. This maceration generally lasts anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks. This is the most popular method of still rosé wine production and is seen as superior to blending. This is the production method for today’s wine.
Bleeding: The final and perhaps rarest of the three main rosé winemaking techniques is bleeding or the Saignée method. While red grapes are macerating in a vat and are working on concentrating flavor and color, a portion of the juice is bled off. The resulting red wine is more concentrated due to the resulting higher skin-to-juice ratio and the bled off Saignée wine is bottled into a darker, more concentrated than normal rosé.