Blush strokes
Pink Champagne is one of those commodities, like white chocolate or Hollyoaks, that nobody will admit publicly to liking. In the industry itself, it is considered a vin de frivolité - or worse, if we are to believe Nicholas Faith. In his 1988 book The Story of Champagne he declares, on behalf of the naturally more reticent Champenois: "They have always hated it."
It is hard to see why. Commercially, rosé is pretty good news. While it is certainly subject to the vagaries of fashion, sales are increasing year on year. Just more than a million bottles were sold here in 1999, representing a 21% rise on the previous year. As recently as 1981, annual British sales of rosé were a mere 90,000 bottles, although admittedly that was in the midst of severe recession.
Somebody is drinking it, then, even if all the Valentine's Day and Mothering Sunday sales are taken out of the equation. And whatever the Champagne houses themselves may say on the matter, surprisingly few of the big names decline to produce a rosé. Some - Pol Roger, Veuve Clicquot and Bollinger included - produce only a vintage-dated pink, not the strategy of houses that feel they are pandering to the vulgar end of the market.
That said, rosé Champagne could be an even healthier commercial proposition if only there wasn't such a shaming price differential between it and its white stablemates. We should be quite clear about this. There is no economic reason for most of the pink wines to be any dearer than the whites. The exceptions would be those wines that have been saigné (macerated) to achieve the colour.
Staining the white juice by means of a short infusion of the red grape skins is a relatively tricky procedure. Not only does it depend on judging each vat to a nicety, but the degree of pigmentation in thin-skinned Pinot Noir is acutely vintage-sensitive, and so no standard method can be applied from year to year.
Furthermore, some colour loss during the secondary bottle fermentation must be allowed for, although the precise degree remains inevitably unpredictable.
These factors together account for the significant colour variation from bottle to bottle in those rosés (among them Laurent-Perrier, Daniel Dumont and Vollereaux) that are still made by maceration.
When a wine is being produced to an allegedly consistent house style, as non-vintage Champagne is intended to be, colour variation sounds like a marketing manager's nightmare. Thus it is that, since pink fizz was introduced 200 years ago, various methods of cheating have been resorted to. An infusion of elderberries in cream of tartar was the preferred colouring agent in the early 19th century, and was found noxious enough to have been superseded within a generation by cochineal, the livid-red exudation of crushed Mexican beetles, once indispensable to cooks making pink frosting for fairy cakes. Then cheaper, synthetic dyes had their day, until someone finally had the bright idea of adding a slug of red wine to the bottle.
By the time the appellation contrôlée system was formulated, adding finished wine to Champagne to colour it was sufficiently established as a technique to see it incorporated into the regulations. It remains the only example of an AC in the whole of French wine law to permit such a practice. No still rosé is allowed to cut corners in such a way.
But if you're not going to make it properly, why bother at all? The answer, perhaps, is that because macerated Champagnes fetch a higher premium than the white versions, the wine-coloured ones may as well rake in the extra, too, even though they are distinctly less labour-intensive to make.
If I were to issue one challenge to the region's ruling body, the CIVC, it would be to suggest that they require rosé producers to state on the label which method has been used. Assuming this meets with apoplexy from most of the houses - more than 95% of rosé is made by the short-cut method, after all - why don't the maceration producers state their method on the label, and leave us to draw our own conclusions about the rest?
What, then, does the consumer expect of pink Champagnes compared with their white counterparts? The first and most obvious point is colour. These can be disarmingly pretty wines, which come into their own for outdoor summer drinking. In the wines I looked at, there was an extraordinarily broad colour spectrum, from onion-skin tawny in the Canard-Duchàne to the faintest blush in wines such as Safeway's Albert Etienne and the Louis Roederer vintage 1993; from a delicate coral or poached salmon-pink (probably the most attractive shade) to full-blown shocking Schiaparelli in the Veuve Clicquot 1993.
The standard addition of red wine is 10-15% of the bottle's contents, so presumably the amount of Coteaux Champenois rouge in the darker ones is at the upper end of that span.
Fruity appeal
There has to be more to a wine than mere colour, though, and what is hoped for above all is a scent and flavour of red fruits, cherries perhaps, or, classically, strawberries. Given that young Pinot Noir so often has this attribute, it is hard to see why so many of these wines should be devoid of fruit. I am sure, although I didn't try the experiment, that a great number of them would have been indistinguishable from white Champagnes if nosed and tasted blindfold.
Sometimes there is a distinct aroma of rough, young red wine to the nose. In a better wine, such as the Clicquot, there is an aroma of pleasantly vivacious, young red wine, in this case Bouzy Pinot Noir. Only rarely, though, does that basket of summer strawberries come wafting up. If that is what your customers are after, my top tip is the vintage Pol Roger. Its 1982 was a shatteringly beautiful example of this style, and while it is getting on a bit now, the residual stocks of the 1990 (the '93 is to be released in May) are still attractive.
Older vintage rosé is not often worth drinking. Exceptions are that 1990 Pol Roger and the still-delightful 1989 Belle Epoque rosé. Mentzendorff has dwindling reserves of the magisterial Bollinger 1990 available. Otherwise, young and fresh is the yardstick for drinking this style, although the unevenness in standard that has bedevilled many non-vintage Champagnes latterly seems even more of a problem with rosé.
Interestingly, Tesco and, more recently, Waitrose have delisted their own-label pink Champagne as a result of unreliable quality. The latter now has the highly commendable Alexandre Bonnet as its house-brand pink. A £15.99 retail tag makes it easily the best bargain for high-street consumers.
Informative labelling, more honest pricing and more dependable fruitiness would go a long way to improving the take-up of this category of Champagnes, but it is always likely to be handicapped to some degree as long as it is seen as a woman's drink. If the Bordeaux producers can overcome their innate conservatism and sell claret with an ad campaign that makes it the next-best sex aid after ice-cream, surely the Champenois could see that there might be a killing to be made with sparkling pink in the gay market? n
