How It’s Made
There are three basic methods to know about rosé wine production: limited skin maceration, saignée or “bleeding,” and blending. As we mentioned in our guide on Red Wine Basics, red wine gets all of its color from the time it spends in contact with the skins of the grapes during fermentation. As such, a winemaker may purposefully craft rosé wine by reducing the maceration to a period of hours or days depending on the desired color, which ranges from pale pink to cherry red. This is widely regarded as the best technique for rosé production. The method known as saignée is a variant on this procedure and involves “bleeding” juice from a maceration, creating a rosé wine as a byproduct of red wine fermentation. Finally, rosé can be made by blending a small amount of red wine into a white wine to give it color, but this practice is prohibited in most wine regions. The notable exception to this is Rosé Champagne - the world’s most expensive type of rosé wine - which is almost always assembled from a blend of red and white base wines.