Rosé wines: bleeding, or "la saignée"

We produce small amounts of rosé wine, using exclusively the bleeding technique, and essentially the cinsault grape.

This technique consists in de-vatting, or belleding off, the free-run juice quite soon after the crushed grapes have gone into the tank. In this way the anthocyans, which provide blueish colour, are only partially released from the skins to the juice. The wine takes on some colour, but this doesn't get as deep as for a red wine.

To enable the juice to run more freely from the tank, we make up bundles of wild asparagus which are placed in front of the draining valves inside the tanks. Here is Francois Perrin checking the run-off juice of the first batches of Perrin Réserve Rosé.

And here you can clearly see the colour of this free-run juice.

This juice is then "fined" before undergoing normal fermentation at low tempereatures.