The medal-winning wines from The Global Rosé Masters 2021 | The drinks business

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We bring you all the medallists from this year’s Global Rosé Masters – taking in top-scoring wines from Greece, Turkey, Italy and France – and reveal our top five pink wine trends of today.

IT’S SAFE to say that the majority of the current discussion about rosé centres on the branding: how it looks, where it’s seen, and with whom. After all, famous names aren’t just sipping pale-pink drops, but producing them, with pretty-looking celebrity-backed bottles becoming more numerous by the year, adding to this pink category’s cachet. It’s been a valuable development for a part of the wine sector that once had a cheap image, based on off-dry examples, from Mateus rosé to Blossom Hill. Indeed, the new power of upmarket rosé, and the potential for further growth, including at a luxury level, has precipitated high-profile investments in the category, from fashion house Chanel to Bordeaux’s Castéja family and then, most notably, luxury-goods conglomerate, LVMH, with its 55% shareholding in Whispering Angel producer Château d’Esclans.

But has rosé’s new-found, premium-level success simply come about because it’s pretty and pink? How good are the wines, what are the styles, and who’s leading in terms of quality? It’s the answers to such questions that prompted us to launch a rosé-only blind tasting for all styles and categories in 2014, with the inaugural Global Rosé Masters. And it’s been revealing, bringing to light the changes taking place in this increasingly popular area of the drinks industry, from the shifting standards, to emerging characters, which we can update for 2021. Taking in the leading brands from benchmark regions, along with new releases from obscure areas, our comprehensive tasting is a health check of rosé today, while providing a guide to fresh sources of pink potential, perfect for the more adventurous buyer.

Before we reveal the results in full from this year’s tasting – which you can see below – we bring you our thoughts on the pink wine category.