The best pink wine producers

Pink wines have a distinguished past, not least because red wine was mostly pinkish once. Today’s young Bordeaux is black enough to snuff out laser beams, but the light-fingered “claret-wine”, which the poet John Keats so enjoyed during his brief adult life (especially chilled, “out of a cellar a mile deep”), was very different. That common British term for red Bordeaux, claret, is an anglicisation of clairet – the translucent ruby that all Bordeaux once was, and that lives on as a deep rosé appellation in Bordeaux today.

Champagne, at the time of the celebrated biannual medieval trade fairs, was neither sparkling nor white. It was, rather, a still, wan pink of the kind wistfully known as onion skin or partridge eye; Burgundy would have been barely deeper. Only the growers of Cahors made truly black wine, and that was because they boiled the must first.

There is no good theoretical reason why pink wine shouldn’t be as fine as any white wine, provided three simple requirements are met. The first: a propitious region prepared to give its best vineyards and finest winemaking skills to rosé production. The second would be the removal of the sugar mask worn by many pink wines. Great rosé is never made from the naturally supercharged musts required for true dessert wines. The third? Quite simply the preparedness among consumers to believe that rosé could be great, and the readiness to pay the prices required to recompense low yields and fastidious vineyard and cellar work.

All three requirements have swung into place in Provence over the past decade. The giant Côtes de Provence appellation is now 86 per cent rosé, up from 70 per cent a decade ago: it’s undoubtedly the main show in the pine-strewn hills between Cannes, Toulon and Marseilles. The Côtes de Provence appellation rules stipulate sugar levels should be no more than 4g to one litre: these are dry wines.

And rosé consumption is rising globally – in France, indeed, more rosé is now drunk than white. A combination of wealthy vineyard proprietors in Provence and their yacht-owning clientele (the two sometimes barely distinguishable) has made fine rosé a reality. It’s one that restaurants and sommeliers around the world are beginning to back, too, as these wines not only take fine wine scrutiny but are hugely amenable to a wide variety of food styles.

I cite some examples of fine rosé from Provence later, but it’s worth priming expectation with a little background about their sensorial profiles. If your idea of fine wine is linked with notions of power, of opulence, of force, of concentration and of impact, then don’t bother with fine rosé. It’s an exercise in finesse, in delicacy and in discretion. This is fencing, not wrestling.

Great technical skill is required to get it right: gentle, cool handling; the use of free-run juice whisperingly tinted by a couple of brief hours with the skins; finely judged reincorporation of juice settlings and yeast lees; a soft inhalation of oak and no more. Keeping the nuances of colour, aroma and flavour in perfect disposition through the physical traumas of export is a further challenge.

The reward is the highest kind of perfection in wine: the perfection of disposition, not accumulation. This translates as a striking physical prettiness of colour and allusive, summer-fruit suggestiveness of aroma and flavour allied to mousseline textures and a graceful, lingering finish. They are emphatically fine wines for drinkers, not collectors. The following are masters of pink:

Château d’Esclans

Sacha Lichine grows and vinifies his rosé with as much care as a Médoc classed growth. His blends are, for Provence, iconoclastic, in that they mingle up to 30 per cent of the white variety Rolle with Grenache rather than using Cinsault, generally the preferred lead grape. Best to my mind is Château d’Esclans itself: both the outstanding 2007 and the promising 2008 are complex, mouthfilling wines in which strawberry cream and peach notes are filled out with white blossom, and the deftly drawn palate fruits are given an almondy texture and length (£17.63 at Goedhuis, tel: +44 (0)20 7793 7900; £229.42 by the case at Bordeaux Index, tel: +44 (0)20 7269 0703). There are two still more expensive cuvées: Les Clans, based on selected fruit (Goedhuis has magnums of the 2007 at £77.94 each), and the old-vine Garrus. In the US, contact Paul Chevalier of Shaw-Ross International (tel: +1 305 794 6180).

Château Léoube

This beautiful waterfront estate in the sub-zone of La Londe is owned by JCB magnate Sir Anthony Bamford and run with great skill by young Romain Ott. It’s one of the few to use wild yeast and the softening malolactic fermentation, and the results are deliciously languid, tongue-caressing and sensual, though impressively complex, too. The “château” wine (based on Grenache and Cinsault with a little Syrah) is, in 2009, full of soft peach and woodland leaf given a teasing iodine edge on the palate, while the more expensive 2009 La Sécret de Léoube (Grenache and Cinsault with a little Cabernet) is more concentrated and bright, with a lick more raspberry. The main British stockist is Corney & Barrow (tel: +44 (0)20 7265 2400; £12.49 for the 2009 Château Léoube, and £17.99 for the 2009 Sécret de Léoube), while the US importer is Jordan Imports (tel: +1 347 404 5560).

Château Minuty

The Matton family’s estate includes vines close to both St Tropez and at Vidauban in the Argens valley, and some of the blends (such as the Cuvée Prestige) include the local variety Tibouren, considered (with Cinsault) to be a classic rosé grape. The style is crisper and more incisive than either d’Esclans or Léoube, and the flavour spectrum mingles orange, lavender and pink grapefruit with the peach. The British agent and stockist is Anthony Byrne Fine Wines (tel: +44 (0)1487 811008) and in the US Romano Brands (tel: +1 516 681 5159).

Domaines Ott

Two of the three Ott domains lie in Côtes de Provence. The 2009 Clos Mireille Coeur de Grain is the lacier of the pair (£22.91 from Goedhuis, as above), while the 2009 Château de Selle Coeur de Grain is fuller and franker, its old vines providing a bright raspberry warmth (£23.70 at Jeroboams, tel: +44 (0)20 7288 8850; £26.48 at www.thedrinkshop.com, tel: +44 (0)1843 570571). Consult Maison Marques & Domaines (tel: +1 510 587 2019) in the US.

‘Andrew Jefford’s Wine Course’ (Ryland, Peters & Small) was judged Best Drink Book 2010 at the Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards

Jancis Robinson is away