We make our Adobe Road Winery Rosé from almost all our our red wine lots (left to right in the photo above: petite sirah, cabernet sauvignon, grenache, syrah, zinfandel and pinot noir). We take just a little bit of juice out of each lot early in the winemaking process. This leaves us with a more concentrated red wine for fermentation and a very cool rosé.
Each of these wine lots gets fermented separately. See all of the different colors? Each grape has a different amount of pigment we can extract at any given time. It all comes down to skin contact and the maturity of those grape skins.
So, petite sirah rosé is very dark, as you can see -- it looks like what you might expect to see in a mature pinot noir wine. But pinot noir rosé? It can be really light, like a salmon or even an almost chardonnay color through the light, as you can see in our photo.
What we get during and after fermentation is a very interesting color palette and in January the mixing really begins. We start blending these finished wines together to make the rich flavor and color profiles our Adobe Road Winery Rosé is known for year after year.
Getting those colors and flavors right is very important -- it’s an art, really -- and we want our rosé to be very expressive of each vintage. It means our winemaker, Garrett Martin spends a lot of time getting the blend just the way he wants it.
So, this amazing palette of color will continue to develop through the winter months, coming together in a kind of alchemy in spring when we release our next vintage of Adobe Road Rosé.
