A Rosé By Any Other Name
Rosé de saignée is Champagne's lady in red.
Now that we’ve had our second 80-degree day of the year this past weekend in New York City, it feels safe to declare that “rosé season” is upon us. While I think the idea of “rosé season” in the warmer months is limiting (I believe Thanksgiving is the best time of the year for the pink drink, personally), nevertheless, I’ve found myself turning to rosé Champagnes—specifically, those made with the rosé de saignée method.
Let me explain. Over the last 25 years, rosé Champagne has enjoyed growing popularity in the U.S. Nearly 20 percent of all Champagne imported to the U.S. is now rosé, rising from only three percent back in 2000. With rosé wine still gaining on red and white in overall sales, consumers now seem willing to level up and pay more for unique expressions of premium—or “serious”—rosé (including sparkling).
This is where things get a little complicated for rosé Champagnes. And as much as we might like to rag on conventional wine education at Everyday Drinking, this is where a little formal wine knowledge, and a bit of French, can come in handy.
The vast majority of rosé Champagnes are made as rosé d’assemblage—meaning that a small proportion of still red wine, made from pinot noir or meunier or both, is blended with white wine to make a pink wine before it gets its sparkle through second fermentation in bottle. This is a notable exception to the 2009 European Union rule that forbids the blending of red and white wines to make rosé. The exception was made because this is the traditional—and some will argue, still the best—way to make rosé Champagne, dating back to the late 18th century. It’s a technique that allows the winemaker to keep the color a very soft pink or pale peach and dial in the red fruit intensity to the exact desired degree. And until recently, it was difficult to consistently grow pinot noir and meunier to full ripeness in such a northern climate—blending was also a way to avoid extracting too much bitter tannins from these black grapes.
I get that rosé d’assemblage Champagnes are Serious Wines (to borrow a phrase from Godforsaken Grapes). I am cognizant of all the skill and expertise that generally goes into making these rosés. It requires the separate (and expensive) vinification of aromatic red wine to blend with the white base wine. Over the past 25 years, as the appetite for pink wines seemed inexhaustible, many of the biggest and best Champagne houses made significant investment in growing special pinot noir clones on top sites in the region expressly for this purpose. The best examples of rosé d’assemblage Champagnes are delicate and elegant, with detailed red fruit aromas and flavors, and they tend to pair well with just about any kind of food.
And yet. These wines feel a little too engineered for my sensibilities (even for Champagne, arguably the most “engineered” of all wines). It seems like an expensive gimmick, albeit one that’s been around for centuries—a way to manufacture another pink-hued good for sale from the romantic-industrial complex.
There is another, relatively rare, method for making pink Champagne: rosé de saignée. After pinot noir or meunier grapes are destemmed, they soak on the skins for a few hours to a few days, imparting more color, tannins, and flavor compounds into the juice before fermentation. Saignée (pronounced seh-NYAY) means “bleeding” in French.
You’ll often see rosé de saignée (or, sometimes, rosé de maceration) on the label of wines made this way. With a few exceptions, these rosé Champagnes are mostly produced by grower-producers.
Rosé de saignée Champagnes are typically much darker in color, with many occupying that liminal space between a rosé and a light red wine (like Tavel, or Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo). They’re fuller bodied but still dry, and some have a slight pleasant firmness from the tannins, depending on the length of maceration. Without a preponderance of chardonnay in the blend, they’re red-fruited, spicy, and savory. Some have a toast or brioche character from long lees aging, or added complexity from barrel fermentation and aging. They’re completely unique, but they are undeniably Champagne.
Still, rosé de saignée often gets dismissed as “inferior” to rosé d’assemblage. I’ve heard one prominent Champagne producer say that he detests rosé de saignée, insisting on the delicate aromas and soft color of a rosé d’assemblage. According to Christie’s World Encyclopedia of Champagne & Sparkling Wine, by Tom Stevenson and Essi Avellan MW, it’s “very difficult to achieve finesse through saignée or other variations of maceration because the tannins in even the best Champagne Pinot Noir and Meunier clones are too harsh.” Maybe several decades ago, that was the case, but not anymore—an evolution in reputation that is not unlike that of, say, pét-nat.
Everyone’s got their preferences, but I believe the rosé de saignée method produces some of the best rosé Champagnes available today. Many of the grower-producers making these wines—such as Olivier Horiot, Sébastien Mouzon, Marianne Gamet, and Aurélien Laherte—are farming single varieties from single vineyards (old vines, in some cases) from a single vintage for these rosés. On the other hand, since rosé d’assemblage requires a separately vinified red wine, the red grapes used for those rosés may come from another variety, from another vintage, and from another vineyard far away from where the rest of the wine’s grapes are grown. Without the red wine blended in, rosé de saignée Champagnes can be more Burgundian in approach, more expressive of terroir.
The Champagnes I recommend below are all from producers practicing organic or biodynamic farming (no easy feat in this cold, wet climate), which, along with the warming climate, allows them to grow healthy, fully ripe black grapes in Champagne. With careful winemaking and monitoring of maceration times, they can thus avoid over-extraction.
The resulting wines are not “too harsh.” They are more concentrated, more expressive, more structural, and even more gastronomic, than those made via rosé d’assemblage. And they are harder won.
Plus, rosé de saignée Champagnes are just more fun. The wines below are all exuberant and enlivening. That’s something we could all use more of as we stumble out of the bleak first few months of the year.
10 Rosé de Saignée Champagnes
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