Red, White and Glou

The growing popularity of a blend that is a blank-spot in most wine legislation

The utter pedantry of wine labelling laws never ceases to amaze me. Most wine classification systems imply that our favourite beverage has to sit neatly in one category. Choose from red, white or rosé. Orange still doesn’t exist in most European appellation systems, and if you are heretical enough to propose blending white and red together, the required bureaucratic moves will be less Michael Jackson and more the St. Vitus dance.

Perhaps our modern obsession with single varietals is where the prejudice started. The idea of blending scares people. It carries a whiff of lower quality along with the vagaries of assemblage – witness Chianti’s gradual move away from the tradition of adding 10% or more of white grapes. Because most heinous of all is mixing not just different varieties, but different colours. Maybe the average rosé drinker believes their summer tipple to be a blend of red and white, but this is usually forbidden at appellation level. When the EU proposed an amendment in 2009 to allow blended red and white wine to be classified as rosé, it was thrown out of court due to claims it would damage quality and reputation.

Cut to the wine nerd’s favourite trivia: Champagne is the exception, the only place where a blend of red and white could be labelled as a rosé. But the restrictions on mixing red and white during, rather than after fermentation are far fewer. A surprising number of rosés contain some white grapes, even if producers are apt to be coy on the label. Think of it as a winemaker hack for ensuring a little more freshness and lift.

Out and Proud

Enough of the rosé. Let’s get to the properly ‘out’ red and white blends. These genre-bending cuvées are far more common than you might think and their popularity seems to be on the increase. The idea of growing, harvesting and fermenting red and white varieties together is far older than the obsession with keeping them separate.