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Alcoholic drinks from Provence, France, which makes 40–45 % of French AOP rosé and about 5 % of the world's rosé

Rosé wine

Red grapes are crushed and left on their skins for only a few hours, or pressed straight away, so the juice takes up a little colour. The pink juice is pressed off, settled cold and fermented cool like a white wine.

Fully documentedAlcoholic drinks7.6 days – 16 daysFamily: Red wine

Recipe

Rosé wine, a photo from Wikimedia Commons
Photo: User:Missvain, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Amounts from a sourceAmounts from a pilot-scale trial at the Centre du Rosé (IFV, Vidauban); cellars set their own.
Red grapesGrenache, Cinsault and Syrah in a Provence trial[leborgne2023]
Sodium hydrogen sulfite2.5 g per 100 kg of grapes, twiceAdded at crushing and after maceration against oxidation and spoilage in the trial[leborgne2023]
Active dry wine yeast0.4 g/LRehydrated 20 min at 37 °C before it goes in[leborgne2023]
Starterinoculated wine yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae)

Total time across the recorded steps: 7.6 days – 16 days

Start
Drag the bar or press Play
12 °C

What changes: Starting material: red grapes, picked whole and kept cool

Step 1 of 6
Harvest and chill the red grapes
Time
Not documented
Temperature
12 °C
Reported
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented
Which microbes the steps name, step by step
Yeasts

Picked into 20 kg bins so the grapes are not crushed and start to macerate by accident. Output: whole bunches, kept uncrushed.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Red grapes are crushed and left on their skins for only a few hours, or pressed straight away, so the juice takes up a little colour. The pink juice is pressed off, settled cold and fermented cool like a white wine. Made in 6 steps over 7.6 days – 16 days. The longest step, ferment cool to dryness, takes 7–15 days (Vins de Provence (vinsdeprovence.com)) and runs at 16–20 °C (Vins de Provence (vinsdeprovence.com)). Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as inoculated wine yeast does most of the fermenting.

Key numbers
Main step7–15 daysReported[civp-rose][leborgne2023]Ferment cool to dryness
Temperature16–20 °CReported[civp-rose][leborgne2023]Ferment cool to dryness
AciditypH 3.4Measured[leborgne2022]Ferment cool to dryness

What makes this one different

Rosé starts like a red wine, from red grapes, but the juice stays on the skins for only hours, not days, and is then pressed and fermented cool without skins, like a white wine.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Direct-press roséBunches pressed slowly with no maceration; lighter rosés.
  • SaignéeAbout 5% to 15% of the juice is bled off a red-wine tank after a few hours and fermented as rosé.

Safety

Rosé is made with little skin contact, so the must is open to oxidation. In the trials sulfite was added at crushing and again after maceration, which protects against enzymatic and chemical oxidation. Bioprotection with Metschnikowia pulcherrima limits microbial spoilage but does not stop oxidation, so one study tested it together with oenological tannins and added 30 mg/L of SO2 at bottling.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

Vins de Provence, the region's growers' body, dates Provence's first vines to the Phoceans who founded Marseille 2,600 years ago, and says wine from red grapes then came out rosé because red grapes were not yet macerated. The Romans began settling Provence in 200 BC. Local abbeys made wine from the 5th to 12th centuries, and phylloxera struck Provence from 1880. The Côtes de Provence AOP was recognised in 1977, Coteaux d'Aix-en-Provence in 1985 and Coteaux Varois en Provence in 1993.

  1. [leborgne2023] Leborgne C. et al. 2023, Untargeted metabolomics approach using UHPLC-HRMS to unravel the impact of fermentation on color and phenolic composition of rosé wines, Molecules 28:5748, doi:10.3390/molecules28155748paper
  2. [leborgne2022] Leborgne C. et al. 2022, Elucidating the color of rosé wines using polyphenol-targeted metabolomics, Molecules 27:1359, doi:10.3390/molecules27041359paper
  3. [puyo2023] Puyo M. et al. 2023, Use of oenological tannins to protect the colour of rosé wine in a bioprotection strategy with Metschnikowia pulcherrima, Foods 12:735, doi:10.3390/foods12040735paper
  4. [civp-rose] Vins de Provence (vinsdeprovence.com), The making of roséweb
  5. [civp-intro] Vins de Provence (vinsdeprovence.com), Intro to roséweb
  6. [civp-history] Vins de Provence (vinsdeprovence.com), History of the Provence vineyardweb