#NWTW Week 26: How They Make Rosé (In Northern Spain)

July 3, 2014

Firstly, sorry this has taken so long to post. This should have been out yesterday but with my first day back from a lovely long weekend in Barcelona, I was…er…mostly walking round in a complete haze. The nice thing about doing Spanish rosé is that it’s so open in terms of what you’re buying. The drawback is that trying to put your finger on what I’m meant to talk about here. Would you really start a blog about how white wine is made in France?

So what I’m going to do is talk about rosado wine from the north of Spain. So think about the regions of Rioja and the neighbouring up and coming wine powerhouse of Navarra. We’ve all heard of Rioja, with the gorgeous red wines, but those grapes are also used to make rosés. Navarre got beaten up a bit because they tried to make reds that were the same as Rioja and didn’t quite manage it. But then some bright spark realised they made fantastic rosés. It’s right up there as the best rosé in the world for me.

The thing about it is the way it’s made. There are lots of ways of making rosé wine, from the sometimes looked-down-upon mixing red and white wine, to direct press of red grapes. What they do in northern Spain is to “bleed” the rosé off. This just means that they make the wine as they would red, but after just a few days of fermentation they drain off some of the wine, so the colour from the skins hasn’t coloured it too much. So it’s pink.

The biggest upside of all this is that you get (in a slightly softer way) all the flavours of a red wine. You get the tannin, you get the red fruits, and you get the body, the alcohol, and all the other characteristics of the red wine. Its so much more (how do I put it?) meatier than other ways of making rosé. It’s well worth trying all the different rosés out there to see which style suits you. But for us this week, it’s all about bled Spanish rosés!

Cheers

Other Posts In #NWTW Week 26:

#NWTW Week 26: Rosado From Spain (Part One)