Theopetra Estate Xinonmavro Rosé, Meteora, Greece 2022 (£21.75, corkingwines.co.uk) Wine producers tend to divide into two temperamental camps. The first, cussedly idealistic type doesn’t think very much about who’s going to buy their wine until it’s time to sell it – they make what they damn well please and only then hope to find customers who share their enthusiasm. The second group is rather more pragmatic: they research potential customers in fine detail before they so much as plant a vine, and everything they do in the vineyard and cellar is in service to what they think the market demands. When it comes to most rosé wine, it looks very much like the second camp is in charge: retailer wine ranges are increasingly filled with dozens of very pale pinks either from, or copying the wildly successful model perfected in, Provence. Maybe the rosé drinking public is getting what the rosé-drinking public wants, but my goodness it makes for some dull wines at times, a sea of indistinguishable pale ordinariness in which pink wines of personality, such as Theopetra’s outstanding mandarin-orange-tingling, rippling, ripely stone-fruited Greek rosé, stand out like beacons in a safe harbour.
Gerard Bertrand Orange Gold, IGP Pays d’Oc, France 2021 (from £19, ocado.com; hedonism.co.uk) While I reckon the majority of the most memorable wines I’ve had in my life have been made by producers operating at the “wine-first” end of the spectrum, I dare say I drink more wines made by pragmatists. And there’s something to be said for a producer who can spot a trend developed by less obviously commercially minded peers and bring it to a wider audience. The South of France is home to a number of impresarios of the palatable mass market, and it’s no surprise that big names such as Jean-Claude Mas and Gerard Bertrand have in recent years added examples of the trendy cult “orange” wine style to their multimillion-bottle vinous empires. Both Bertrand’s seriously stylish Orange Gold, with its gentle tannic bite, spice and exotic fruit, and Mas’s brightly peachy Arrogant Frog Organic Orange 2023 (coming to independent merchants in the UK this summer with an rrp of £13.50) are deliciously drinkable alternatives to me-too rosé – as, indeed, is Advini’s gently apricoty bargain Gros Manseng Vin Orange, Vin de France 2022 (£8.25, Asda).
Celler del Roure Safrà, Valencia, Spain 2021 (from £19.99, quaffwine.com; thefinewinecompany.co.uk; nywines.co.uk) As I’ve written in this space before, some of the most exciting winemaking in the world at the moment is happening at the centre of a stylistic Venn diagram where orange wines, deeper-coloured rosés and lighter reds meet. Much of that work is happening in the cellars of smaller-scale wine romantics such as Pablo Calatuyud, the man behind Celler Roure in Valencia, whose gorgeously fluent light Safrà red is testament to his commitment to reviving undervalued local grape varieties (in this case mandò) and the local tradition of making wine in clay amphorae. It’s a red that drinks like a white, while his Les Prunes Blanc de Mando Rosado 2022 (£23.50, noblegreenwines.co.uk) is, in the words of retailer Noble Green Wines, a “white wine made from a red grape that has turned out pink” – or, in other words, a rosé of enormous character that pulses with energy and mouthwatering salted pink grapefruit zing.
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