Wine Review: The Color of Love

By: Jordan Shuler

Suppose you’re involved in a budding relationship, full of romance and intrigue. You’re spending many evenings together, exploring the city’s fine restaurants, enjoying wine and sharing dessert. Everything is great except for one obstacle; you prefer to drink white wine and the second half of this romantic duet prefers red! At first your contrasting preferences are a topic for conversation yet in time they become a challenge to your dining experience.

According to Buddhist wisdom, the key to any relationship is compromise and learning to cherish the other more than we cherish ourselves. If you both take this wisdom to heart you might find yourselves in a conundrum where you insist on choosing a bottle of red to satisfy the other, and your partner is intent on finding a white to please your taste. Alas, there is a solution to be found in the world of rosé wine.

Your first instinctual reaction to this colour of wine might be negative, along with most wine shoppers. Then you learn of some rosé styles that have nothing in common with the notoriously sweet, white (only in name) Zinfandel of California, other than colour.

Thus you begin an exploration into the multifarious options of this pink, liquid world. You learn that rosé wine can be made in two ways. The first and less common technique is quite elementary and involves mixing the white and red juice of separate grape varieties, much as a young artist would mix paints to achieve a desired colour. This method is employed in the Champagne region of France, producing sparkling rosés.

The second and most common technique called Saignée involves removing some pink juice from a tank of red wine before it has completed its fermentation. Red wine acquires its colour from the pigments in the grape skins while being macerated or soaked with the wine inside the fermenting tank. The wine that is removed early from the tank will not attain its full colour potential but rather various degrees of pink depending on whether it was removed just a few hours or a full day after fermentation began.

The majority of rosé wine in the world is dry, the preferred style for most Europeans. We North Americans, the British and Australians typically prefer sweet food and drink and the winemakers in these countries produce rosés to please our palates. There can be no judgment as to whether a dry or sweet wine is of better quality, it is only a matter of subjective preference and our preferences, we have learned, are better left open to compromise.

Enjoy your vinous adventure into the pink. A few locally found options, in order from dry to sweet:

A Spanish Wine Tour

Complexity: Good In Wine And In People

Versay – Redefining The Keg Party

Follow Your Nose To Pleasure

Jordan is Toronto’s finest wine educator!  He professes the grape at George Brown College, organizes wine tastings and creates personalized wine courses for you and perhaps your friends or significant other.  He’s fun, unpretentious and full of knowledge.  Visit Jordan’s website: www.jojovino.com.