Pale Ledge Rosé 2025

Most rosé in the world is a by-product. You make a red, you drain some juice off the tank early to concentrate what is left, and the pink stuff you drained becomes a rosé with a reason to exist that has nothing to do with drinking it. We think that is why so much of it tastes of nothing in particular.

Pale Ledge is picked for itself. We choose the rows — the lower Coldfoot Pinot that always ripens light, and the Quarry Road Gamay nearest the road — and we pick them earlier than we would ever pick for a red, at the point where the acid is still bright and the skins have only just coloured.

One morning

The whole wine is harvested in a single morning. Pickers start at twenty to six with head torches, and the last crate goes into the press at a quarter past ten, before the sun is on the fruit. Whole bunches, straight in, no crushing, no time on the skins. The colour you see is only what bleeds out of the skins in ninety minutes of gentle pressing.

That is why it is so pale. People sometimes send it back at the bar thinking they have been poured a white. We pour them a second glass and ask them to taste before they look.

In the glass

Redcurrant rather than strawberry. The bitter white pith of a pink grapefruit. A green, crushed-stem snap from the whole-bunch pressing, and a finish that tastes faintly of salt, which we have no scientific explanation for and have stopped trying to find one.

Eight degrees. A tumbler is fine.