By Natalia Suta
Working in a wine shop, I’ve spent more time than is healthy watching people shop for rosé. No one reads the back label. No one asks about the grape or where it’s from. No one wants to talk style. But everyone – everyone – holds the bottle up to the light. If it’s pretty and pale, it goes in the basket. If it’s too dark, back on the shelf it goes. I watch it happen regularly and every time I die a little inside, wondering when the hell we started treating rosé like it is bubblegum lip gloss instead of actual wine.
Somewhere between a glass of Frosé and a #roséallday hashtag, the pink wine has become a form of content, sold by silhouette, typography, and hue. Not taste. Not terroir. What matters is how it photographs, preferably in natural light, next to linen napkins and a perfectly staged burrata. What sits behind the label is secondary, if it registers at all. Imagine rejecting a Rioja because it looks too intense in a glass, or passing over a Vouvray because it doesn’t match your garden furniture. It’s absurd – and yet we do that all the time with rosé.
We talk about rosé as a booming category, but rarely about how superficial it’s become. There is a deep (pun intended!) irony here. In a time when wine lovers claim to crave authenticity and diversity, the majority of commercial rosé has become a masterclass in conformity. Made to look the same, taste the same, and behave the same.
Part of the problem is that rosé has been relentlessly feminised – not in a way that empowers, but in a way that strips it down to something soft, sweet, and delicate. Over time, the wine became styled as feminine, then commercialised as femininity itself. Labels turned pastel, handwritten, or florally embossed. Bottles became thinner, taller, more sculpted. All of a sudden, the visual identity of rosé started doing all the heavy lifting. It was either pink, pretty, and perfectly behaved, or it was out. Wines with structure or swagger were labelled “masculine” and pushed aside. A deeper shade became shorthand for a flaw, not a feature. Complexity was coded as effort, and effort is the enemy of easy drinking. Rosé has been reduced to something that flatters an outfit, not something that challenges a palate.
And once consumers began buying rosé with their eyes, the industry didn’t hesitate to lean in, hard. In the race to appeal to the brunch crowd and their feeds, producers have bleached their wines into visual compliance. Paleness is no longer an accident of grape and process – it is a brief. The wine is pressed lighter, fined harder, and made safer. Bottle shapes got even sleeker. Taglines got even vaguer. Labels turned even more washed out. The rosé category has been branded within an inch of its life, and we all keep nodding along, pretending it’s still about the wine.
Influencers aren’t just jumping on the bandwagon – they are steering it. Scroll through any social feed of a self-respecting vino lover and you’ll find it: a pastel bottle nestled in ice, a hand with manicured nails holding a glass against a sunset, a poolside flat lay complete with floppy hat and paperback. These aren’t tasting notes, they’re aspirational mood boards. Rosé isn’t marketed as a beverage to be understood. It’s positioned as an accessory to your best life. Aesthetics over substance, branding over terroir, packaging over provenance. No one is asking who made the wine, how they made it, or what grapes are in the bottle. Dress it up with enough trinkets and you barely need a vineyard at all.
Buyers lean on pale styles, too, because they know they sell themselves. Sommeliers play it safe. Distributors push what’s pretty. Retailers order what’s familiar. The merry-go-round keeps turning.
What’s being overlooked in all this pale pink parade is rosé’s stylistic diversity. It is intrinsically a category defined by possibility: a spectrum of shades, structures, and styles. It can be breezy or serious, still or sparkling, bone-dry or off-dry, delicately herbal or deeply savoury. It could be made from any number of grapes, each bringing something different to the glass. It could be textured, salty, spicy, mineral, or proudly food-friendly. Rosé has never been a one-note wine – but you’d never guess that from the way it’s been packaged and sold.
And that’s the real tragedy. Because when rosé is allowed to be itself – not stripped down to fit a pale, polished mould – it can be extraordinary. It can hold your attention. It can be joyful, complex, surprising. It can express place and process. It can be so much more than a placeholder between white and red. But the louder the pastel branding gets, the quieter the wine becomes. And so we’ve let a category bursting with endless expressive potential shrink into something designed not to offend.
The biggest casualties are the wines that refuse to lean into the marketing machine. Tavel’s bold rosés – once celebrated for their depth, grip, and food-friendly credentials – now struggle to be seen at all. Too dark, too intense, too complicated for the pastel-hued algorithm. Spanish rosados from Rioja and Navarra – once proud of their cherry-bright colour and punchy structure – are being toned down to fit the market. And don’t even think about trying to get anyone excited about a Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo – with its coppery shimmer and red-fruited depth, it’s about as welcome on the average wine list as a bottle of Lambrusco was in 2003.
And yet, all is not lost. There are winemakers out there ignoring the algorithm, making rosés that clash with the colour scheme. There are writers who will describe the structure, not just the hue. Retailers who will take a risk on flavour over familiarity. Drinkers who will choose a rosé not because it looks good in a photo, but because it has something to say.
The solution isn’t complicated. We just need to stop treating rosé like it’s a seasonal prop and start treating it like wine. Drink it like wine. Talk about it like wine. Ask what’s in the bottle, not how well it matches the napkins. Post less, taste more. It’s not too late to rescue pink wine from its pretty shackles and remind ourselves that it was always meant to be more than something to match the nail polish. Rosé deserves better. And so do we.