Mirabeau La Folie Sparkling Rosé, Provence, France NV (£11.99, down from £14.99 until 27 February, Waitrose) I know it’s one of the more artificial traditions. But the association of sparkling rosé wine and Valentine’s Day is surely one of the more harmless bits of annual corporate cashing-in. Certainly, these days, a good bottle of pink fizz no longer has to cost any would-be suitor a full-day’s pay, since good-value, high-quality rosé sparkling wines are being made by so many more producers in so many more places – a development which is not all that surprising when you consider they represent a meeting point of the two most successful wine genres of the 21st century, sparkling wine and still dry rosé. Most of my favourites are produced by sparkling specialists who are comfortable with the complicated, and very specific craft of fizz production, and for whom a change in pigment doesn’t require a new set of equipment and skills. But there are some still rosé specialists who’ve managed to introduce a bubbly version successfully, notably Maison Mirabeau, whose La Folie is a delightfully light, gently tropical-fruit-flavoured, bubbly take on classic pastel-shaded Provence rosé.
Château la Coste Sparkling Nooh, Provence, France NV (£35.99, wanderlustwine.co.uk) Another Provence still rosé producer dabbling in bubbles is Château La Coste, whose 0% abv Sparkling Nooh is, as my own Valentine put it, “actually not bad” – high praise indeed from a confirmed non-alcoholic wine sceptic and I agree it is one of the best of this breed, with a convincing strawberry character and refreshing tangy finish to make it a choice smart enough to lend a patina of glamour to a dry Valentine’s (although, as my Valentine also said, “my goodness” it’s expensive). Away from Provence, and no-lo, I was impressed, as I always am, by Tasmanian brand Jansz’s pink part of their consistent bottle-fermented sparkling range, Jansz Premium Rosé Brut NV (£19.95, slurp.com), while Catalonia provides two romantic candidates at very different pricepoints: the gorgeously mouthfilling, herb-flecked cherry and gentle orange citrus of Raventós I Blanc De Nit 2021 (from £22.50, londonendwines.com; the goodwineshop.co.uk) and the outrageously good value dry, refreshing summer-fruit cordial-and-cream of The Co-op Cava Rosado Brut NV (£7.50, The Co-op).
Champagne Ayala Rosé Majeur Rosé NV (from £44, tanners-wines.co.uk; Jeroboams.co.uk, ndjohn.co.uk) When I said pink fizz doesn’t have to be pricey, it certainly can be, with the original home of rosé sparkling, Champagne, generally the culprit for the most challengingly priced bottles (hello Dom Pérignon Rosé P2 1996 and your fetching little £1,203.20-a-bottle price tag, with its wonderfully precise extra 20p at justerinis.com). Coming a little closer to earth, champagnes I feel are worth splashing out on if you have the budget on Wednesday include two of the original masters of the style: Ruinart Rosé NV (currently down to £73.97 at northsouthwines.co.uk) and Billecart Salmon Rosé NV (£70, hedonism.co.uk). Ruinart was in fact the first pink champagne producer (most likely by accident) way back in 1764. But most houses have only really started to take it seriously in the past two or three decades, and the arrestingly racy, elegant Rosé Majeur, from Ayala, a sister house to the more celebrated Bollinger, is a fine example of modern pink champagne at a price that isn’t quite so much of a passion-killer.
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