Summer rosé - Olly's ultimate guide

As garden-party season kicks in, there’s no reason why your choice of rosé wines shouldn’t be just as varied and energising as your music playlist. Here we look at what makes rosé work so well, along with a handpicked seasonal selection of 20 to try

- OLLY SMITH

Rosé is liquid Abba. Classic, yet enduringly entertaining with wide appeal and capable of endless reinterpretations to the delight of fans old and new. While summer is without question rosé’s greatest hit, from fizz to fortified, it seems to be on tour year-round these days – but sipping in a sunbeam is tough to beat.

More than any other wine style, rosé’s approachability and informality is peerless, and paired with foods it can tackle everything from curries to a simple salad. While pale, dry, powerful rosé is fantastic to partner with intensely flavoured dishes such as those heavily laden with garlic or reduced tomato sauces and pungent salads, rosés that have an even deeper colour can give a more faithful iteration of the local grapes they’re made from, and offer the chance to pursue even more specific food pairings.

A good example is the lesser-known Greek grape of Mouhtaro, which I recently tasted for the first time on a visit to the Valley of the Muses about 90 minutes’ drive north of Athens in central Greece. The deeply coloured rosé I tasted from Samartzis (see tasting notes, p25) with its pomegranate-strawberry tension and silken texture was nothing short of a revelation – sipped alongside pink, charred local lamb chops cooked over charcoal it was a pinpoint-perfect pairing with a salad of locally sourced wild leaves. If you’re already a fan of Tavel or Bandol rosé, pink Greek Mouhtaro should be at the top of your list.