Rosés Hot This Summer
Nothing says "summer" better than a glass of chilled rosé wine.
Wine expert Josh Wesson says this summer, it's all about rosés.
The founder of the "Best Cellars" wine shop and contributor to Food and Wine magazine told The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith Tuesday that the pink wines aren't just one-dimensional: There's a wide variety of rosés, perfect for everyone's palates.
He showed Smith his favorites, along with good food matches for each.
A decade ago, the only pink wines that anyone talked about came in oval bottles destined to end up holding candles. Today, Wesson explained, the category is red-hot, with producers old and new offering up tasty tinted tipples in a staggering array of styles. From France to Australia and California to Spain, it's not hard to be pretty in pink, Wesson observed.
"The knock on rosé," Wesson said, "is that it's not for serious wine drinkers, but who drinks wine to be serious? Rosés are very delicious, and made all over the wine world now."
Precisely because rosés are partially-made red wines, he pointed out, they can appeal to just about anyone who likes wine, regardless of color preference. In fact, you could look at rosés as red wines that drink like they're white, or visa versa. Chillable, fruity, mouthwatering, and ranging in presentation from light to full-bodied, still to sparkling, and dry to sweet, rosés are remarkably adaptable when it comes to food.
The wines Wesson displayed were a crisp, bone-dry rosé from Greece, a fruit-filled off-dry rosé from France, a deeply fruited rosé from Australia, a sparkling rosé from Spain, and a sweet rosé from California.
To watch the segment,
Wesson's "rules to lip rosé by":
1. Drink the youngest wine possible. Rosés don't benefit from aging. Rosés are all about fruit, and the longer you age a wine, the more the fruit fades. So, buying an old rosé isn't good, because you lose the taste. If you're looking for rosés now, don't buy anything younger than from 2005. You should even be able to find some of the Australian 2006 vintage, because they harvest six months ahead of the Northern Hemisphere.
2. Drink them well-chilled. Even though rosés are partially-made red wines, they behave more like a white when it comes to serving temperature.
3. The lower the alcohol level, the more refreshing the wine.
4. Don't fear a touch of sweetness: Not all off-dry rosés are White Zinfandel.
5. Never spend more than $20 on a bottle of rosé in a store. Above $20, you're paying more for the shape of the glass than the wine inside.