A symphony of New World rosé wines

Something different: American roses are becoming more popular. (AP file photo)

For a couple of decades, California rosé meant white zinfandel, a semisweet, sodalike confection with an alcoholic kick that was enormously popular with consumers but anathema to wine lovers who favor the dry, refreshing rosés of France, Italy and Spain.

Today, rosés from throughout the New World — not just California — are reaching our retail shelves. That’s because consumers have realized that a well-chilled rosé is an ideal hot-weather wine and because modern techniques have wineries concentrating their red wines by “bleeding” some of the juice off the skins during fermentation, a technique called saignee. Instead of discarding this pink-hued juice, they make rosé.

Bonny Doon Vineyard was one of the pioneers in California rosé, producing its first with the 1981 vintage. Winemaker Randall Grahm initially decided to make it to concentrate his Rhone-style red wines and “because I like rosé,” he recalled in a recent e-mail exchange. Today, most of the grapes are grown with rosé in mind, so Grahm has them picked when acidity is still high.

Bonny Doon’s Vin Gris de Cigare is a dry rosé in the style of Provence, but Grahm cheats a bit to achieve that effect. To tame the fruitiness of his California red grapes, he adds some white wine.

At Alexander Valley Vineyards in Sonoma County, winemaker Kevin Hall produced an exceptional rosé made entirely of sangiovese, the main red grape of Tuscany. The wine is fermented and “aged” — for just a few months — entirely in stainless steel.

For his first two vintages, Hall kept the juice on the skins for 18 hours to give the wine a vibrant red color. In 2008, the vintage now on the market, “there was a lot of color in the skins, so we drained the juice after six hours,” he said. “It still colored up like crazy.”

Crazy is a good word for it. Crazy good. Crazy fun. Crazy delicious.