From €7.05, $10.79, £7.54
In our 16-year archive of wines of the week, numbering over 800 recommendations, rosé wine has featured a mere 14 times. A shocking (pink) shortcoming! In an attempt to redress that balance, allow me to introduce the fifteenth: Le Pavillon rosé from Château Beauchêne in the southern Rhône Valley.
This blend of 40% Cinsault, 40% Grenache, 15% Mourvèdre and 5% Syrah is made by a producer more renowned for their Châteauneuf-du-Pape, various vintages of which have very respectable scores in our tasting notes database.
I tasted the 2014 vintage of their rosé in May, and was impressed by how well it had held up after a year in bottle. It is made in a style that seems closer to Provence than to the Rhône, with a pale salmon colour and delicate red-fruit flavours. Perhaps counterintuitively, such styles of wine often seem to age more reliably than the more typical southern Rhône rosé, which is deeper in colour with riper fruit.
That's not to say this is a wine that requires cellaring, mind – its primary appeal is the bright, refreshing fruit character it bestows on the palate, and the definitely dry, savoury finish that follows. That refreshment factor is partly thanks to blocked malolactic conversion to retain acidity, as well as stainless-steel fermentation at 16 ºC to avoid losing any of those precious red-fruit aromas.
For less than ten pounds, this compares very favourably with most Provence rosés at the same price or more, and for as long as the sun shines this summer, this is a lovely wine to have standing by in the fridge.
It can be found (via the wine-searcher link below) in retailers in France, Spain, Massacheusetts and Illinois, and it is also currently on sale at Private Cellar in the UK, reduced from £9.99 to £7.54 – which makes it a very smart buy for drinking this summer.