A WINE MYTH BUSTED

The Truth About Pink Wines

“Oh, I always thought rosés are sweet,” a guest said to me recently as I poured an aperitif before lunch, to wit the Unearthed Chiaretto di Bardolino 2023 (€9.99, GBP7.99 UK) from Aldi, a wine that enchanted me on first meeting in early March: it was colour, the bottle, the label and, above all, the fact that this form of Bardolino from North-Eastern Italy, is hard to come by. Bardolino is almost always red and light and fruity, light in tannin, the kind of wine that you think should perhaps be pink when it grows up.

And yes, it’s dry, with just 0.9g per litre of residual sugar, i.e. the fruit sugar left over after fermentation. For context, the ubiquitous 19 Crimes has 12g, Dada has 11-12g, Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc has 4g, Cloudy Bay 1-2g and your average red Bordeaux 1g. LBV Port weighs in at 100g or more while your average Prosecco has between 17g and 30g, Brut Champagne (which, of course, has a little sugar added) typically contains under 12g.

So this Chiaretto di Bardolino is dry. Bone dry.

But why are so many people put off pink wines, thinking they are actually sweet? I wonder if it’s a kind of folk memory of when we drank Mateus Rosé, a very long time ago. It was distinctly sweet and, frankly, didn’t actually taste of wine. Or of any wine I’ve tasted since I was a fresher at university. And there’s the curse of Rosé d’Anjou, a wine that could be lovely if vilified dry rather than semi-sweet (which tastes actually sweet to most grown-ups) and made from Cabernet Franc rather than Grolleau Noir. Yes, me neither, to be honest.

Rosé d’Anjou used to be a big seller in Chinese restaurants and it might still be for all I know.

But your typical pink wine these days is dry. Even the celebrity ones: Graham Norton’s Rosé has 3.2g, Kylie Minogue’s has 4g. Both are very decent wines.

There are quite a few very expensive rosés on the market and it would be invidious to name names but I think the whole lot of them are far too dear for what they are. And I say that having tasted many of them blind against ones that cost less than €15, some a lot less. Sure they are meticulously made and lots of money is spent on packaging and marketing, but the fact is that pink wines are just for fun. You will search in vain for layers of fascinating complexity; it just isn’t there. That’s not what these wines are for. They are for fun, and they are versatile with food, pretty to look at and, even in our Irish climate, nice and Summery.

So caveat emptor. And drop into Aldi to see what I’m on about. That Chiaretto won’t be around forever and it would be a shame to miss it.