 Rosé and John Saker have been through a lot together. While at times They haven’t seen eye to oeil, he has discovered pink can be pure pleasure.
“We had this Portuguese wine last night,” proclaimed my mother proudly, showing me the empty bottle she’d brought home from the restaurant. It was dark and club-shaped, with a dreamy illustrated label coloured in Desert Road shades. My head swam. This was European wine culture.
I was an unworldly teenager given to fits of romantic reverie, but I was not alone in being ensnared by Mateus Rosé.
At its popular height in the early 1970s, 3.25 million cases a year of the familiar, round bottle were sold around the world. In wine-innocent countries such as ours, the light, medium-sweet, slightly fizzy Mateus was often not only an introduction to rosé, but to wine itself.
Then I discovered Aussie reds at university and began to question rosé’s credentials. Neither red nor white, it seemed a wine for people who didn’t like wine. A few years’ study in the US only confirmed this view. At formal college dinners, California rosé was downed like Coca-Cola, to which it owed a stylistic debt.
Everything changed in the northern hemisphere summer of 1977. It was a summer in Provence. She (who later became my wife) and I hitchhiked and slept à la belle étoile. Too poor to have more than the occasional, inexpensive restaurant meal, we often cast envious glances at the diners on restaurant terraces. What were they all drinking? Rosé. In the Old Port at Marseilles, under the plane trees in the old Roman towns of Arles and Orange, and at the beachside bistros in Le Lavandou and Fréjus, chilled, onionskin-coloured rosé was the wine of choice.
And what a joy that dry, steely wine was. It refreshed, quenched and matched a wide range of foods, from salade Niçoise to steak frites.
For the next few years I stayed in France and rosé was always close by. And it was not seen as a summer-only libation. When I was playing for a basketball club during a dark, snowbound winter in the Vosges, my team-mates often opted for rosé to have with an assiette de charcuterie late in the evening after practices. Again, French rosé’s light, bracing qualities made it ideal for such an occasion.
Returning to New Zealand was a return to rosé wilderness, a place where rosé was seldom taken seriously and mostly misunderstood, despite the remarkable progress elsewhere in the wine industry.
More rosé is now made in New Zealand – partly in response to the growing popularity of the dry, enticing Provençal-type rosés in trendsetting New York and London.
However, quality is still an issue here. In this latest rosé tasting, only four out of 60 wines were awarded four stars.
Tasting Panel
The Sauvignon Blanc judging panel reconvened for our New Zealand rosé tasting. Joining regular panel chair John Belsham was Australian writer and judge Nick Stock and experienced international judge Jim Harré. Jane Boyle from New Zealand Wine Cellars was associate judge.
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