Welcome to the dark side: Champagne’s Rosé de Saignée

‘I want the explosion of the year! I want the madness of the year!’

This is what Jean-Baptiste Geoffroy, winemaker at Champagne Geoffroy, says to me on a sunny morning in Aÿ as he pours a wine that, to many casual Champagne drinkers, might ring a few alarm bells.

It’s a deep pomegranate pink, almost red, the foam itself gently tinged with colour as it rises up the sides of the glass.

Explosion is the word, too; just standing over the glass is enough to get a hit of Pinot Noir’s joyous side from the sunny 2018 vintage: cherries, oranges and tropical fruits race their way out of the glass.

Scroll down for tasting notes and scores for eight rosé de saignée Champagnes to try

Busting the dark rosé myths

The perception that dark rosé equals sweet still lingers around rosé Champagne. It’s not true, of course, but it’s something that still makes Champagne’s rosés made using a very particular method – maceration, often called saignée – a slightly harder sell.

Nicolas Dupuis, export manager at Champagne Alexandre Bonnet in the Côte des Bar, confirms this as he pours the domaine’s Les Contrées, a prodigiously dark and expressive rosé made with 90% macerated Pinot Noir and 10% Pinot Blanc.

‘Our standard rosé is paler, easier, and everyone understands it,’ says Dupuis, ‘whereas Les Contrées needs someone like a sommelier to tell the story of the wine.’

Making rosé Champagne

Most of Champagne’s rosés are produced using the assemblage method, whereby a carefully calibrated amount of specially made Pinot Noir red wine is added to a still white base wine before bottle fermentation.

This allows a very controlled amount of colour and red fruit characters. Lighter rosés will see between 5%-10% red wine addition, while darker, fruitier styles may see 15% or more.

Champagne’s much darker rosés, on the other hand, are made by maceration: the grape skins and pips are kept in contact with the juice during the first stages of the winemaking process. (Strictly speaking this isn’t the saignée method, which is usually a by-product of a red wine production).

Risky business

Maceration is risky; if you’ve ever had a rosé that feels grippy, drying or aggressive, the chances are that you’re tasting one that has extracted a lot of tannin from grape skins and pips.

This is something that Champagne, with its delicate body and high acidity, certainly doesn’t want in abundance, which is why the assemblage method, with its inherent control, is generally more popular.

The maceration production process is completely different to other kinds of Champagne because it involves destemming the grapes. This avoids too much green tannin – or stemminess – being extracted from the grape stems during maceration. By contrast, for other Champagne styles the grapes are left as whole bunches.

The choices made in this rosé production process are therefore more akin to the choices made during red winemaking: around temperature, crushing, pressing and fermentation.

After a period of fermentation, the free run juice is drawn off the tank without being pressed. The skins are then pressed, and this press juice contains more tannin and structure.

‘It is important to have the press fraction to complete the blend,’ says Irvin Charpentier, winemaker at Alexandre Bonnet, ‘but we don’t press strongly, and the wine is still 85% free fun juice.’

Nomenclature is a bit of a sticky topic – Dupuis points out that they can’t call Les Contrées a true saignée because it has an addition of 10% still white base wine, even though the colour and style is very much there.

Laurent-Perrier even adds Chardonnay grapes directly into the Pinot Noir maceration for its premium Cuvée Alexandra rosé, a process that is also used by in-demand growers such as Maxime Oudiette in Beaunay. When it comes to rosé, creativity is the name of the game.

Rosé winemaking trends around Champagne

At Geoffroy in Aÿ, the grapes are kept whole, saturated with carbon dioxide (to protect from oxygen) and left for up to 84 hours before the skins are removed, yielding a deep colour.

It might surprise some to learn that even relatively pale rosés – and even prestige cuvées such as Louis Roederer’s Cristal Rosé – are made via a type of maceration too, in this case a cold soak.

This is when grapes are macerated at cold temperatures before fermentation begins, to extract colour and flavour but not too much else.

‘We don’t push the maceration,’ explains Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, cellar master at Louis Roederer, ‘we don’t want tannin.’

At Roederer, as at a number of small producers such as JM Sélèque in the Coteaux Sud d’Épernay, this method is called infusion.

It is Laurent-Perrier, though, who is by far the most prominent advocate for maceration rosé among the main houses. It achieves the impressive technical feat of producing one of Champagne’s most widely recognised, globally successful rosés entirely by this tricky maceration method.

Cellar master Michel Fauconnet says that the method is unforgiving: ‘We have specific plots of Pinot Noir that allow us to obtain a perfect maturity and concentration, and we have to sort each single grape manually before the maceration in the tank begins,’ he explains.

Because of the extended skin contact, any imperfections – underripeness or rot – will severely taint the wine. It’s for this reason that the rare sight of sorting tables in the cellars of Champagne is usually related to either red wine production or rosé de saignée.

Rosé Champagne for the adventurous

There’s no need to fear the dark side of Champagne rosé, then. Rather than being sweet or simply fruity, rosés from maceration are often the most structured, food-friendly and deeply flavoured of all, able to take on settings where light red wines might ordinarily be called for.

Perhaps they’re not wines to pour for the unprepared, but in the right context, they represent a love letter to Pinots Noir and Meunier that is uniquely Champenois.

Eight rosé de saignée Champagnes to try:

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