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Roots in Ancient Greece
The roots of rosé winemaking can be traced back to ancient Greece, when much of the red wine produced was pale red. There are at least two competing theories on exactly why that was:
According to myth, Amphictyon, son of Deucalion and Pyrrah, first mixed red wine with water at meetings of his councilors to dilute its strength in order to minimize quarreling. But, as Russ Bridenbaugh points out in his excellent expose "Stop and Smell the Rosés" in Wines & Vines Magazine it was probably a product of something a bit less mythological and a lot more practical: wine was not left to macerate for as long as it does today and, thus, never became fully red.
Eventually the Romans popularized darker red wines in Europe around the mid 100s B.C., but rosé wine remained popular in parts of France — most notably, Provincia Romana (today's Provence region) — and the surrounding Mediterranean area.
A.D. Production
Post Jesus, rosé laid down roots in Bordeaux where, during the Middle Ages, 'clairet' — a dark rosé wine that's all but extinct today — became the most common regional wine exported to English. This domination lasted until the 18th century, when darker wines (which eventually took the name 'claret' among the Brits) again became dominant.
By the 19th Century the practice of producing "light wines" via shorter contact with grape skins during fermentation eventually spread to the United States, where rosé wine found a marginal place in California around the mid 1800s.
During the following century Provence reclaimed its former glory as tourism grew along the Côte d'Azur and brought more visibility to the wines. This inspired countries throughout Europe — notably Italy and Spain — to build the category as well. The birth of the wine U.S. was, on the other hand, a bit of an accident.
The Birth of American Blush Wine
By the 1970s, demand for white wine in California exceeded the availability of white wine grapes. California producers, ever sensitive to the market, resorted to making "white" wine from red grapes via the saignée method.
The first pink wines weren't necessarily sweet, but after the success of a batch of semi-sweet rose released by Sutter Home — the result of a stuck fermentation. The category of "blush" wines was born. These inexpensive "pink and sweet" wines caught fire, eventually breeding a generation's worth of negative connotations for rosé wine.
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