Blush Wine

A blush wine, also known as a Rose, is a pink or pale-red wine. Although its color falls somewhere between that of a red and a white, the treatment of blush wines aligns more with white wines. They should be kept cool and drank young and chilled. Blush wines also tend to be light and refreshing, and are most enjoyable during the hot summer months.

There are three methods used to produce a blush wine:

-The first method involves contact with the skins of the grapes. Grape skins, in addition to providing tannins, also give a wine its deep, red color. So, to produce a white wine, the grape juice is fermented without the grape skins, creating a clear liquid. To make a red wine, the juice is fermented with the grape skins, which impart the garnet color. Blush wines are fermented with the skins for only a short duration, thus not allowing the liquid to be dyed quite as dark as that of a red wine.

-The second method is known as bleeding, or saignee. Here, a wine maker removes some juice from a barrel of red wine before it has developed its deep red color, then ferments it separately from the red wine.

-The final method is to pour a small amount of red wine into a vat of white wine. This is the least popular way to create a blush wine, although it is used to make Pink Champagne.

Despite the negative connotation that may exist among blush wines (largely due to the White Zinfandel craze in the 1980s), there are many high quality Roses out there and the wine category is slowly gaining back popularity.