A History of Rosé Wine

Rosé has an image problem and a secret. The image is of something frivolous and new — a summer drink, a hashtag, “rosé all day.” The secret is that pink wine is almost certainly the oldest wine of all: the very first wines humans made looked far more like today’s rosé than like a deep, brooding red. The story of rosé runs from an ancient Greek colony on the French coast to a Portuguese bottle beloved of Jimi Hendrix, an accident in a California cellar, and a Hollywood château — and it turns on a question most drinkers never think to ask: was this wine grown to be pink, or simply bled off from something else? For the full story, see the complete history of wine.

Rosé was the first wine

Here is the great irony of rosé: it is not a modern novelty but the original template. The ancient Greeks and Romans generally made pale, light wines, because leaving crushed red grapes in prolonged contact with their dark, tannic skins — the process that makes a wine deep red — was not yet standard. Their everyday wine, often watered down, was closer in colour to a rosé than to a modern Bordeaux¹.

For much of history, in other words, pink was simply what wine looked like.

Massalia: the birth of Provençal rosé

The heartland of rosé has a precise birthplace. Around 600 BCE, Greek colonists founded the trading city of Massalia — today Marseille — and planted vines along the sun-baked coast of what is now Provence. Pressing their red grapes and drawing off the juice before it could stain too dark, they made exactly the kind of pale, refreshing wine the hot Mediterranean climate called for².

When the Romans took over Massalia and made it a great trading hub, that wine culture spread and deepened. Provence has been producing rosé more or less continuously ever since — over two and a half thousand years, the longest unbroken pink tradition in the world³.

How rosé is actually made

One persistent myth deserves killing: good rosé is not red wine mixed with white. That blending method is actually banned for still rosé in the European Union — the one great exception being rosé Champagne. Real rosé gets its colour from the grape skins themselves, and there are three main ways to coax it out⁴.

Grown for pink, or bled from red?

That third method — saignée — sits at the heart of a real quality divide, and it is worth understanding. The technique was borrowed from the red-wine cellars of Bordeaux and Burgundy, where “bleeding” off some juice concentrates the red that remains. The pink run-off is a bonus; the winemaker’s real goal is a better red. When that run-off is bottled and sold, the rosé is, quite literally, an afterthought⁵.

Contrast that with a purpose-grown rosé, where the grapes are farmed and picked specifically to be pink — harvested earlier, for bright acidity and delicacy, with the rosé as the whole point rather than a leftover. The difference shows in the glass: intentional rosés tend to be fresher, more vibrant and longer-lived, while saignée rosés are typically darker, richer and more structured, but heavier and less precise.

Nowhere has this mattered more than in California. In a warm climate, grapes grown for a big red are picked late, loaded with sugar and low in acidity — exactly the wrong raw material for a fresh rosé. Bleed off their juice and you often get a pink wine that is too alcoholic and faintly bitter. For years, much American rosé was precisely this kind of by-product, which is part of why serious pink wine was slow to be taken seriously in the United States⁶.

The American rosé renaissance of the last decade is, in large part, the story of winemakers abandoning the afterthought for intention — seeking out cooler, high-acid vineyard sites and picking grapes early, on purpose, to make pink. The rule of thumb is simple: the best rosé is grown, not bled.

Provence, the pink capital

If rosé has a capital, it is Provence, and the numbers are startling. More than seventy per cent of everything the region makes is rosé, it produces something like a third of all French rosé, and France in turn makes close to half the world’s pink wine — with Provence its single most important source. No other major wine region on earth has bet so completely on one style⁷.

Why Provence? Partly those two and a half thousand years of practice — the region simply never stopped believing in pink. But the land helps too. Provence enjoys a classic Mediterranean climate with more than 3,000 hours of sunshine a year, so grapes ripen fully; and the famous Mistral, the cold wind that can tear down the Rhône valley at 100 kilometres an hour, dries the vines after rain and keeps them healthy and disease-free. Slow, even ripening in a dry climate lets the grapes hold onto the acidity that gives Provençal rosé its signature freshness⁸.

The result is the pale, bone-dry, delicately fruited style that the rest of the world now copies. When people say a rosé tastes “like Provence,” they mean it as the highest compliment — and that is why the region is the global benchmark.

The grapes behind the pink

Rosé is almost always a blend, and the grapes are chosen for what each brings to colour, aroma and texture. The great Provençal varieties are southern-Rhône reds, joined by a couple of local specialities and even a white grape for lift⁹.

Beyond Provence, the choice of grape defines the style. Delicate Cinsault, Grenache and Tibouren give the palest, most refined wines; Mourvèdre and Syrah give darker, more structured, ageworthy ones like the rosés of Bandol. Elsewhere, Pinot Noir makes featherlight rosé in the Loire and underpins pink Champagne; Spain’s Garnacha and Tempranillo make the deeper, fuller rosado; Grenache in the Rhône’s Tavel makes a famously robust rosé; and California’s Zinfandel gave the world sweet blush White Zinfandel. Same idea, very different pink¹⁰.

The pink flood: Mateus conquers the world

Rosé’s modern reputation, though, was made by something far less serious. In 1942 a Portuguese producer launched a slightly sweet, faintly sparkling pink wine in a distinctive flask-shaped bottle: Mateus. Exported from the 1950s, it became a global sensation¹¹.

By the early 1970s Mateus — with its Portuguese cousin Lancers — was, astonishingly, one of the best-selling wines on the planet, sold in some 120 countries. Its fans ranged from Queen Elizabeth II to Jimi Hendrix, who was famously photographed swigging it from the bottle. For millions of people in Britain and America, Mateus was their first taste of wine at all — and it fixed rosé in the public mind as cheap, sweet and fun¹².

Somehow the world’s oldest style of wine had become its least serious — and would have to earn its respect all over again.— on the reputation of rosé¹²

The American accident: White Zinfandel

The next twist was pure serendipity. In 1975, the California winemaker Bob Trinchero of Sutter Home was trying to make a more concentrated red Zinfandel by bleeding off some pale juice — a saignée, in effect. That juice suffered a “stuck” fermentation — the yeast quit early — leaving a faintly sweet, pink wine he bottled almost as an afterthought¹³.

It sold out at once. “White Zinfandel” went on to become a phenomenon, at its peak one of the best-selling wines in the United States, and it introduced a whole generation of Americans to wine through a sweet pink glass. Like Mateus, it was wildly popular — and did rosé’s serious reputation no favours at all¹⁴.

Rosé grows up: the luxury renaissance

Then, in the 2000s, the pendulum swung hard the other way. Led by Provence, a wave of bone-dry, pale, sophisticated rosés reclaimed the category, and pink wine went from embarrassing to aspirational almost overnight. Nothing sealed the turn like celebrity: in 2011 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie bought Château Miraval in Provence, and their first rosé, made with the respected Perrin family and released in 2013, sold out within hours¹⁵.

Miraval, Whispering Angel and their peers turned dry Provençal rosé into a luxury good and a cultural badge — “rosé all day” — and made pink one of the fastest-growing categories in the wine world¹⁶.

Why rosé endures

So rosé has come full circle: the oldest style of wine, dismissed for decades as frivolous, is now both fashionable and, at its best, seriously good — especially when it is grown to be pink rather than bled from red. From a Greek press at Massalia to a Hollywood château, it has never really gone away, because a glass of cold, dry pink wine on a warm evening is one of the simplest pleasures wine offers, and always has been.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• Claret, Constantia and the British thirst
• The natural wine movement
• A history of French wine

References

1. VinePair — Wine 101: The History of Rosé, Part I: Massalia. vinepair.com ↩
2. GuildSomm — A Brief History of Rosé (Victoria James). www.guildsomm.com ↩
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Marseille (ancient Massalia). www.britannica.com ↩
4. Encyclopaedia Britannica — wine (winemaking). www.britannica.com ↩
5. The Washington Post — American Rosé, Once Scorned, Just Keeps Getting Better. www.washingtonpost.com ↩
6. Decanter — California Rosé Wine Renaissance. www.decanter.com ↩
7. Vins de Provence — Provence Rosé Style and Terroir Expression. www.vinsdeprovence.com ↩
8. Vinetur — Provence Emerges as Global Leader in Premium Rosé. www.vinetur.com ↩
9. Wine-Searcher — Provence Rosé Wines and Grape Varieties. www.wine-searcher.com ↩
10. Wine Scholar Guild — A Rosé Renaissance in Provence. www.winescholarguild.com ↩
11. The Gray Report — Mateus Rosé: Once the World’s Biggest Wine. blog.wblakegray.com ↩
12. Mateus Rosé — Our Story. www.mateusrose.com ↩
13. Napa Valley Register — Sutter Home White Zin Turns 40. napavalleyregister.com ↩
14. Trinchero Family Estates — Our Story. www.tfewines.com ↩
15. Decanter — Pitt and Jolie, Château Miraval. www.decanter.com ↩
16. Wine Spectator — Château Miraval. www.winespectator.com ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
For the deep history of how wine — and its colour — evolved.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
Good on wine styles, trade and fashion through the centuries.

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