2022 Rosé Release

We use the phrase “rosé all day” to promote our Rosé of Pinot Noir, but if you’re new to drinking rosé you might want to know how Rosé stands out from other red or white wines. We produce about 100 cases of Rosé each year and it is a highly regarded favorite of our customers.

Tasting notes for our 2022 Rosé are as follows: “ The wine opens with hints of honeysuckle, apricot, and peaches that form a bright counterpoint to the crisp acidity and grapefruit aromas in this classic Rosé of Pinot Noir. The supple fruit and pleasant aromatics round out the mouthfeel of this medium-bodied elegant wine.”

With its signature pink color, rosé can be difficult to classify. Rosé is typically made with red wine grapes, but it doesn’t belong to the red wine family. It is own distinct type of wine based on how the fruit is processed. We make ours from Pinot Noir fruit and ferment it dry, but the varietal and technique used is the winemakers prerogative. Rosé is considered a seasonally consumed wine, but it can be enjoyed all year.

Rosé get its distinctive color by leaving the crushed grapes in contact with the skins for several hours. The juice initially resembles what you’d expect from a white wine, but brief skin contact with the crushed fruit extracts anthocyanins and tannins that contribute color and flavor. The reason for doing this is that many of the aroma and flavor components in wine are located in the skin of the grape. Longer contact with skins extracts deeper color into the juice and changes the flavor profile. The macerated fruit is pressed after limited exposure to the skins to extract and ferment the juice. The remaining pulp is discarded.

Limited maceration time leads to shorter shelf-life, and less color stability in the resulting wine. Rosé is generally contained in clear bottles to showcase the color, however exposure to sunlight can cause color to fade. Rosé can improve significantly with aging due to how they are made, but its generally intended to be consumed after bottling. To allow our Rosé to have a longer shelf life we add a small amount of Pinot Noir to “color it up” before bottling, this adds richness and age-ability to the wine. However, it is a delicate balance - in the attempt to achieve a certain hue of pink by “coloring up”, the delicate flavor and phenolics of Rosé can be altered.

In the 2022 Rosé, we have opted for less color and a more authentic flavor as opposed to the 2021 Rosé where we opted for more color. We would characterize these two vintages of Rosé as a discussion about the dominance of representation over reality. Our winemaking style is to provide a fulcrum of provocative ideas in our wine tasting flights. We are using these first vintages to experiment with opposing points of view on how to generate flavor, and dialing color up or down in Rosé has a transformative power on flavor.

A very interesting flight for tasting would be to compare the 2021 and the 2022 to see that very small differences in wine making technique have a very large impact on the resulting wine.