Tasting pink wines for summer used to be a struggle. Not any more – rosés have got drier and finer as a happy consequence of the continuing British boom in pink wine. Sales have doubled since 2005, compared with the pathetic 6 per cent annual growth that the whole wine sector musters.

Given that, at long last, the world’s winemakers are treating rosés seriously, I should not have been surprised that my pink wine tasting success rate this summer was far higher than that achieved for either whites or reds. Roughly 10 per cent of the 10,000 wines I taste annually come through as winners, but around a third of the pinks I gave the full organoleptic once-over for this article got my vote. True, I weeded out the worst of the unbelievably sticky, evil California blush and white zinfandel pinks, with their 35g of residual sugar per litre, before I started, and was relieved that the likes of Torres’s clean but cloying Ribena-esque 2007 Santa Digna Cabernet Rosé from Chile were in the minority.

Other pink wine pitfalls to avoid are those confected blue-pink rosés and those that have a washed-out, dirty, tawny oxidised hue. Pink wines, lacking the acidity of white wines and the fruit and structure of reds, are more fragile, so check out how your rosé has been stored before you buy. Marks & Spencer sells almost all its pink wines in light-deflecting leaf-green bottles for this reason. Above all, make certain you buy a young, vibrant, fresh-as-a-daisy vin de l’année pink, remembering that French rosé and other northern hemisphere pinks are under a year old, while southern hemisphere 2007s, with their harvest in March, are over a year old and tiring.

Of the cheaper rosés, it’s a toss-up between M&S’s 2007 Las Falleras Rosé (£3.79) with its pleasant, grapey fruit, or Tesco’s lively, peppery 2007 Gran Tesoro Garnacha Rosé (£3.19), both from Spain. If it’s cheap and sweet you want – and I accept that lots of you do – plump for the 2007 Champteloup Rosé d’Anjou (Waitrose, £4.99), whose grassy, curranty fruit offsets the sweetness. Tasty rosés from Provence, the place that partly created the wine, are hard to find, but the 2007 Château Pigoudet La Chapelle from Aix-en-Provence has pleasing inky, spicy fruit (Majestic Wine, £7.99; two for £6.99 each). On the next quality tier up, the bottles to buy are the French classics, either 2007 Sancerre Rosé Les Ruettes with its fine, lively, lemony, spicy pinot noir fruit (M&S, £10.99), or the rich, raspberry-stashed 2007 Château d’Aqueria Tavel Rosé (Majestic, £9.99; two for £9.49 each).

And if you want to go the whole hog, trot into Around Wine, London W1 (020-7935 4679), and buy Riedel’s hand-blown, lead crystal, half tulip-shaped Rosé Sommelier glass, £40 a throw but guaranteed to make the most of its contents. Here’s to summer.

jane.macquitty@thetimes.co.uk

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