A Brief History of Why Everyone Should Drink Rosé
Our wine predilections are more than just personal preference. Taste aside, what ends up in our glasses is more accurately described as the result of savvy marketing, historical trends, and technological know-how. If that seems hard to believe, you only have to examine the history of wine itself to see how our preferences are shaped less by personal choice than by the influence of external forces.
Let’s start with the big picture. Archaeological evidence suggests we’ve been fermenting grape juice into wine for around 8,000 years, or longer than all of recorded history. And up until the late 1700s, the tannic, dry reds that critics rave about today were considered fit only for peasants and slaves. This means that for almost 99% of humanity’s existence, patricians and popes alike would have turned their noses up at Stag’s Leap and every other Napa Cab.
What did the elite drink instead? Rosé.
You’d be forgiven if that wasn’t your first guess. These days, the modern American wine palate, much like the modern American political sensibility, is polarized: the average consumer thinks of wine in a binary sense, whites versus reds, and rosés are the overlooked third party that we turn to mainly for poolside refreshment. Even in the wine industry itself, a sizable number of figures evince a one-dimensional, even sexist, outlook of rosé, considering it the purview of sorority girls and housewives, not ‘serious’ connoisseurs. Naturally, this leads to a second question: how did rosé come to be replaced by red wine as the prestige choice?
Many wine professionals are quick to blame Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate and scoring system for the rise of bold (some might say over-extracted) reds. They’re certainly not wrong; throughout his career, Mr. Parker singlehandedly drove the wine world toward his preferred style, changing the American palate and the international distribution of grape varietals alongside it. But we would argue that his influence wasn’t the ultimate cause of this realignment so much as the culmination of a centuries’ long process in which first the masses and then the elite came to prefer a more robust kind of wine.
To understand why, it’s important to understand the production methods and drinking habits surrounding wine in the past. For much of our history, vintners had only rudimentary tools and little control over the fermentation process; red grapes were crushed and pressed directly after harvest, with little skin contact and short fermentations, leading to a beverage that was pale pink in color and with a low percentage of alcohol by volume (ABV). This makes sense in light of wine’s intended purpose at the time: people drank primarily for hydration, not to catch a buzz.
Drinking wine to hydrate makes no sense to the modern drinker. Virtually all traditional wines on the market today have an alcohol content that dehydrates us, rather than the other way around. But prior to the advent of water treatment and sanitation practices, waterborne diseases such as cholera made drinking from the local stream or pond a risky proposition, whereas fermented beverages were relatively safe; harmful microbes have difficulty surviving in the presence of alcohol even at low concentrations. Additionally, as mentioned above, wines of the period had a lower ABV than their present-day counterparts, usually clocking in at less than 10% (the lightest modern examples are typically 11% alcohol or more). Even when particularly boozy batches of wine were produced, they were typically watered down to enhance hydration and minimize drunkenness. This was common practice in ancient Rome, for example, where it was culturally frowned upon to be intoxicated, and even the aristocracy drank wine diluted to only 3-6% ABV–practically the same amount as most beers, especially when compared to a 15-16% barrel-raised Cab.
There were more than health considerations at play, however. Cultural proclivities, such as the Greco-Roman taboo against drunkenness, drove drinkers of means toward certain styles of wine, while economic necessities catalyzed the creation of new ones. Even though the term rosé is a fairly recent invention, writers of antiquities spoke at length of the benefits of lighter styles of red, ascribing medicinal perks to the crisp wines produced from fermenting free-run juice; this is the freshest juice, obtained when first crushing grapes with minimal skin contact, and to this day is reserved for the best examples of many wines. Meanwhile, wine produced from longer periods of skin contact–more tannic and deeply colored–were perceived as too harsh, meant only for those who had no other options. The tannins and other compounds which leech into the wine this way act as preservatives, extending the shelf-life of the final product. As such, when the Romans pioneered the use of oak barrels in winemaking and enabled the creation of reds as we know them, they did this not to achieve their own version of Napa flavor profiles but to create a means of reliably hydrating their slaves and soldiers.
This arrangement persisted for millenia. Better wine presses and other innovations through the Medieval and Renaissance periods further improved our ability to make ‘traditional’ reds closer to how we know them today, but they were still considered inferior, to say nothing of white wines which were just beginning to come into their own. Rosé’s clout remained unchallenged until the Age of Exploration.
The extended voyages that established European colonies across the globe tested winemakers' abilities to reliably supply said colonies. Lighter styles of wines, lacking the sufficient amount of preservative tannins, spoiled before they ever reached their destinations; only bolder reds and fortified wines were able to survive the journey overseas. To create a product capable of making it to foreign shores, winemakers began to increase skin contact and barrel aging regimens, further increasing the body and tannin of red wines. At the same time, access to wine of any caliber became a status symbol among colonists, and because only tannic reds and fortified wines could be reliably sourced, these wines acquired a prestige abroad which they lacked at home.
The rest is simple economics: as populations abroad expanded and grew beyond those of Europe, European winemakers suddenly had a booming market for bolder red wines which hadn’t existed before. Those who could adapt to these changing conditions stood to make a fortune, with the houses of Bordeaux a prime example of the confluence between maritime ventures and the development of bigger, bolder reds. The Old World clung to its preference for lighter wines, and to this day still prefers a more deft touch in the cellar than we Americans employ, but after two devastating wars and the rise of American hegemony, it was only a matter of time before Napa Cabs took over the world.
Where does that leave rosé today? On this side of the Atlantic, a great deal of consumers are still haunted by sickly sweet White Zinfandel (itself a legacy of a previous craze for white wines in the 60s and 70s–California producers were so overwhelmed by the demand that they had to find a way to turn their red wines into something more palatable for white wine drinkers, making a blush monstrosity that lingers in grocery stores and gas stations even now). It wasn’t until the early 2000s that we even began to import quality rosé from reputable sources. With generations raised on Sutter Home and Beringer as the archetype rosés, it comes as no surprise that rosé has such a lackluster reputation in the popular imagination.
We can only hope that time and exposure undo this reputation. Modern shipping technology has massively expanded the ability for even casual drinkers to encounter stellar bottles from all over the globe; now, like with any other style of wine, drinking quality rosé is simply a matter of knowing where to look. Any decent shop, bar, or restaurant these days should have a better offering than Sutter Home.
The bottom line: there’s nothing stopping any of us from drinking like the kings and queens of old. And rosé deserves to be enjoyed, year-round. Any sommelier would tell you that rosé offers some advantages that its ‘pure’ white and red brethren don’t, enjoying a hybrid status where it possesses some of the tannic structure of reds with the refreshing aspects of whites. It pairs with almost everything and has its own range of textures, clarities, and flavors. If nothing else, this blog should prove that rosé has always been more than White Zinfandel, and always will be.
