How is rosé made?

There are three common methods: direct pressing, a short maceration on the skins and saignée. With direct pressing, whole or destemmed bunches go straight into the press, the skin giving off some colour during the slow pressing. Those rosés are generally lighter.

With short maceration, the juice first stays on the skins until the desired colour is reached, after which it is pressed and fermented. Saignée works the other way round: from a tank set up for red wine, 5 to 15 percent of the juice is drawn off, which continues as rosé while the rest becomes red wine. The French wine institute IFV points out that saignée requires no press, whereas direct pressing calls for a pneumatic press with a pressure of no more than 1200 millibar.

Skin contact is short, 2 to 20 hours in Provence. The IFV mentions 3 to 10 hours at 15 to 20 degrees as usually sufficient to obtain the desired colour and aroma.

To prevent fermentation from starting during that soaking, the must is cooled to below 10 degrees. By comparison, with red wine the skin contact lasts days to weeks. That difference of hours versus days is exactly what distinguishes rosé from red wine.

The colour comes from the skins of blue grapes and not from additives. The longer and warmer the contact with the skins, the deeper the colour, which the winemaker steers with the length of maceration.

A large part of that colour is lost again afterwards. According to the IFV, the wine loses about 50 percent of its colour intensity during fermentation alone, so the starting point is deliberately darker than the end result should be. The clarity of the must also plays a role: the IFV holds that the turbidity before fermentation should be below 200 NTU, with a finer setting between 50 and 100 NTU depending on the desired aroma.

For still wine that is not allowed in the European Union. Article 8, paragraph 1 of Delegated Regulation (EU) 2019/934 of 12 March 2019 provides that blending a white wine without PDO or PGI with a red wine without PDO or PGI cannot produce a rosé wine.

The regulation has two exceptions: when the end product is intended for the preparation of a cuvée as described in Regulation (EU) 1308/2013, and when it is intended for semi-sparkling wine. That is why rosé champagne does consist of blending. For still wine, the Provençal wine body sums it up briefly: a rosé is not a mixture of red and white wine.

Fermentation proceeds cool, at 16 to 20 degrees according to the IFV and at 18 to 20 degrees according to the Provence wine bureau. Cool fermentation keeps the fresh, fruity aroma in the wine.

A series of fixed measures belongs with that fermentation. The IFV mentions 3 to 5 grams of sulphur dioxide per hectolitre at harvest and 5 grams per hectolitre at the end of fermentation, plus 30 grams of yeast nutrient per hectolitre in two doses for a must that lacks nitrogen. For keeping on the fine lees, 4 degrees is used, for at least ten days. The bottle usually holds 700 to 900 milligrams of carbon dioxide per litre, and 4 to 6 grams of residual sugar per litre is often judged better by the senses than completely dry.

Rosé accounted for 8 percent of global wine production in 2021, or 21 million hectolitres out of 265 million. On the consumption side the share is higher: 10 percent, 23 million hectolitres out of 235 million.

The OIV measures a growth in rosé production of 25 percent between 2001 and 2021, while the production of red wine has fallen by 25 percent since the peak in 2004. France is the largest producer with 6.5 million hectolitres and 31.9 percent of the world total, ahead of Spain with 3.7 million (18.6 percent) and the United States with 3.4 million (16.5 percent). In Provence, the 2023 harvest consisted of 89 percent rosé, well over 1.08 million hectolitres, and the Netherlands was the third export market for it with 29,901 hectolitres.