Proud To Be Pink

06 September 2005 By db staff writer

“standfirst”>Rosé is no longer regarded as the pasty-faced cousin of red wine, getting sand kicked in its face at picnics and barbecues. Nowadays, apparently, it’s even safe for men to drink it, says Chris Losh

If some bright spark had suggested 10 years ago that in 2005 the world would be awash with Cabernet Sauvignon and running short of juice for white Zinfandel they would have been locked up – assuming, of course, anyone could stop laughing for long enough to cart them away. Yet that is what is happening. “It’s not so much a case of how much can we sell as how can we manage what we’ve got!” says Emma Chamberlain, marketing manager for Percy Fox, owner of Blossom Hill.

The wine that once dared not speak its name is now on everyone’s lips. To borrow a phrase from the fashion industry, pink is the new red.

These things, of course, need to be put in some sort of perspective. According to AC Nielsen, rosé is still only 5% of the UK offtrade. But it’s growing at a rate that leaves its red and white counterparts standing. Nielsen put its yearly growth at around 30%, in a market growing at about one tenth of that. In the last couple of years, the one-time pink pariah has almost doubled its market share (from 3% in 2003), and shows no signs of slowing down yet. Some have estimated that by the time rosé eventually finds its niche, it could account for one bottle in 10 in the UK off-trade.

If this year’s London Wine Trade Fair was anything to go by, that’s not so hard to believe. There were possibly hundreds of new pinks from all over the world launched onto the market with accompanying PR fanfare. Rosé is out, proud and fighting.

But where have all the new rosé drinkers come from? The answer, it seems, is “everywhere”, which goes some way to explaining the category’s meteoric rise. Market research by Percy Fox shows that rosé isn’t just attracting drinkers from red and (particularly) white wine, but also from RTDs and lager.

Couple this information with the fact that rosé drinkers are younger than drinkers of red and white wine, and that drinkers of New World rosé are the youngest of the lot and you reach one overwhelming – and highly significant – conclusion: rosé has suddenly become the recruiting ground for the wine category.

Perhaps this needs to be qualified further. After all, it’s unlikely that 19-year-olds are likely to move from Bacardi Breezers to Fetzer Syrah rosé at £5.99. But New World blush wines, with their sweetness, low alcohol levels, reasonable prices, strong branding and canny TV associations (Blossom Hill aligned itself with Friday night camp-fest Will and Grace to good effect) have been highly attractive to previously non-wine drinkers.

“This growth in rosé is really important,” says Patrick McGrath MW of Hatch Mansfield. “We’ve got to introduce new, younger people to wine – wean all these guys and girls off alcopops – and rosé can be a really good vehicle for doing that.” Especially, it seems, if it’s from California. Sales of the Golden State’s blush wines grew by a staggering 43% last year, and the country now accounts for over half of the UK’s pink market.

If a fair proportion of the rise in rosé can be explained by people using it as a painless way of entering the wine sector, even more are migrating across from red or white wines. The reason, it seems, is an interesting shift in consumer perception, that rosé is no longer automatically naff but a valid colour in the wine drinker’s palette.

“Consumers are beginning to experiment more with wine, and the clichés associated with rosé wines are becoming less applicable,” says Vicky Steel, category marketing manager at the Co-op.

Hence, it’s not just keen but unsophisticated wannabe Bridget Jones’s who are using it as a sweet stopping-off point on the way to fully-fledged bottles of chilled, dry white wine, but also hardened Chardonnay-and-sofa junkies, who are moving away from their usual white heartland and dabbling with their first attempts at redness.

Perhaps even more amazing is the growth of rosé consumption among males. While men may be happy to moisturise and facialise in private, they have, until recently, been far more hesitant about displaying what was seen as their feminine side in public, unless it was as a compromise with their other half. He wants red, she wants white, they meet in the middle – rosé.

“Rosé used to be seen as a poof’s drink,” said one understandably anonymous industry source. “But men have grown up a bit and are now happy to admit they love rosé.” It may have taken a while, but metrosexuality, it seems, has come to the world of wine.

One of the most interesting aspects of the rosé explosion has been the way in which it appears at first sight almost to have caught the trade by surprise. This is a trend which seems to have been driven by the market rather than by the industry, and which the latter is belatedly scrambling to make the most of.

Certainly the hot summer in 2003 will have helped to give the category some impetus, but were this the only factor consumption would have died the following year, which was largely miserable across Europe.

Yet the trade, while largely being caught by surprise at the pace of the growth in rosé, can still take some credit for creating the conditions in which the drink could flourish.

“One of the key issues must be that the quality and diversity of styles is much better than it’s ever been before,” says Patrick McGrath. “We’ve got serious winemakers making rosé out of the right grape varieties rather than just doing one on the side.” Probably the most obvious exponent of this “serious” rosé style is Fetzer, whose Syrah rosé broke the mould by a) pricing itself over £5, and b) picking up a gold medal at the International Wine Challenge. It’s not that quality rosés didn’t exist before; they just tended to be the preserve of the wine aficionado and, to its credit, Fetzer saw an opportunity.

 “We were trying to fill a gap for a rosé brand which delivered quality for money, rather than just being sweet, cheap, cheerful, drink-it-in-the-sun rosé,” says Simon Legge, marketing director, Europe, for Brown-Forman. “It was meant to give a more genuine option to more serious wine drinkers, and in so doing we happened to hit upon a USP that no one else was doing. If you like, we brought premium rosé to a wider audience.”

Unsurprisingly, others have followed. Gallo brought out a Syrah rosé in its Turning Leaf range at a similar price point, which is currently growing at 140%.

While the Fetzerisation of the category obviously helped to give rosé some muchneeded mass-market credibility, there were other significant factors at play, too. The Californians were not shy about deep-cut promoting to encourage trial.

And the work by Mateus shouldn’t be underestimated, either. This, after all, is a brand that for decades more or less was the rosé category. Sales peaked in the early 1980s, but since then it saw its influence heavily eroded by New World interlopers. After 20 years of tumbling sales, the owner, Sogrape, finally realised that the brand was in serious trouble so it engineered a fairly major repackaging (the first for 60 years!) and stumped up £1m for an ad campaign. Several owners of rival rosés acknowledged that this high-profile promotional work benefited not just Mateus (whose sales have returned to the levels of the early ‘80s) but the category as a whole.

“Rosé is not as promotionally sensitive as other parts of the wine category,” says Emma Chamberlain. “There’s less choice, which means greater loyalty. People aren’t competing as much for those promotional slots, so the deals don’t get silly.”

This seems to be backed up by figures at the Co-op, which has seen its rosé sales increase 48% in volume and, significantly, 53% in value. It isn’t, in other words, driven by discounting. What promotional work the Co-op has done has, interestingly, been carried out throughout the year.

“Rosé wines are beginning to be seen as a legitimate alternative to reds and whites and are acceptable to drink outside of the key summer months of July and August,” says the Co-op’s Vicky Steel. It’s a viewpoint that is echoed right across the trade.

This redistribution of sales (the summer “peak” is now more of a “wave” according to one brand manager) is partly explained by the informal “social and sofa” occasions when the new rosé consumers tend to drink it, but also by the style of the new arrivals themselves.

The plethora of quality rosés appearing on the market is largely fruit-driven, dry (or near as dammit) and higher in alcohol. In many respects, these rosés perform more like a red wine than a white, and there is some irony that as sales of traditional lighter reds such as Beaujolais or Bardolino struggle, so rosé goes from strength to strength.

When it comes to producing these newstyle, hairy-chested rosés, the New World has a major advantage. “The ability of the New World to deliver flavourful, palatable wines that drink well young is a bonus with rosé just as it is for reds and whites,” says Warren Adamson, European sales manager for Kiwi winery Villa Maria.

Besides climate, there are business-driven advantages as well. The first, and most obvious, is brand-related: specifically, it’s far easier to attract customers to your new rosé if they are already drinking your reds and/or whites.

Likewise, varietal labelling. Consumers who are confirmed fans of, say, Merlot, will find it easier to migrate to a varietallylabelled rosé of the same grape than a similar wine from Château X in Entre-Deux- Mers with no cues on the label.

For the blush-wine consumer, varietal labelling may not be such an issue. “It’s not about varietals, it’s about it being pink… and the brand gives reassurance,” says Percy Fox’s Chamberlain. But towards the mid-price sector, where drinkers are likely to be migrating to the category from dry red or white wine, it’s certainly more of an issue. Mateus, for instance, has just brought out a Tempranillo rosé, backed by a £1.2m ad campaign and aimed, significantly, at the 20-35 age group, while the Faustino group in Spain has just launched two new varietal Cabernet rosés from Navarra and La Mancha.

The difficulty with such new launches, of course, is that the Old World can end up supplying wines that the market wants – but not from them.

“Maybe people will tell us that the wines we’re launching now are not typically Spanish and they prefer to stick with what we have, but so far the feedback has been good,” says Roberto Alonso, export director for Bodegas Faustino.

Patrick McGrath at Hatch Mansfield is equally cautious about his new Jadot rosé, a non-varietally labelled Gamay that’s been bottled under screwcap. “We’ve just launched an Errazuriz rosé, a Villa Maria rosé and a Jadot rosé,” he says. “They’re not necessarily all going to work, but let’s just see what happens.”

My money would be on the Kiwi and the Chilean ahead of the Burgundian. The Old World countries are tending to see steady, organic growth, whereas the New World is positively explosive, albeit often from a lower base. Marks & Spencer, for instance, which is more Old-World driven than New, has increased its rosé facings by 80% in the last year, but is unlikely to see further expansion of the rosé variants this year: any further growth will be organic, not distribution-driven.

It’s a cautionary note in an otherwise optimism-laden atmosphere, and begs the not insignificant question: can all these new pink arrivals possibly hope to find a place in the market? Simon Legge at Brown- Forman isn’t so sure. “It’s like anything new,” he says. “Organic wine was going gangbusters a few years ago, but an awful lot of that growth was generated by new listings and there was a bit of a shake-out and levelling off as retailers looked at their figures. Sales and marketing guys look at the trend and say, ‘rosé is hot so let’s add one to our portfolio’, but there has to be more to it than that. One of the reasons our rosé has been so successful is that it has really delivered on quality.”

Nonetheless, even with some flattening off of growth and shaking out of participants in the next 12 months, the future (no pun intended) does indeed look rosy. One brand manager estimated the category could get up to 10% of the off-trade wine market, and Hatch Mansfield’s McGrath, for one, thinks that this is not just a blip, but a long-term development. “I really hope it is sustainable,” he says. “I think it’s got a lot more legs because the wine trade is more branded and consumer-driven and the people who are developing these new wines are taking the time to do it properly. I don’t think it will be a flash in the pan.”

Perhaps, though, it’s best to leave the final word to Paul Evans, brand manager of the resurrected giant, Mateus. “The rosé category still only accounts for 5% of the overall market, so there is plenty of room for expansion – there’s no room to expect this to slow down or change. Consumers are demanding fresh, fruity, easy-drinking wines, and the rosé category is best placed to respond to this.”