So many people drink rosé year-round these days that it’s easy to forget that it was once regarded as faintly embarrassing. Clearly they’re still at that stage in deepest Umbria, where I recently heard a posh rosé described as “a woman’s wine” – and by a cool-looking young Italian in his 20s, not an unreconstructed 60-year-old with a hairy chest and a medallion, which somehow made it worse. The men in our group indignantly replied that they, too, drank rosé, as indeed most men do. The stuff isn’t even self-consciously referred to as “brosé” these days, either.
That said, modern rosé is almost invariably a pale baby pink, usually from Provence, which has cornered the market in the more-of-a-white-wine-than-a-pink sort of style. The best lookalikes, if you like drier rosés, tend to be from France, too, mostly from the southern Rhône and Languedoc, though they’re even drier up in the Loire than they used to be (Morrisons has a Touraine rosé in its The Best range at £8.50, which is not a bad price, but would be even more attractive on a multi-buy deal).
