Any sugar with your rosé?

Last weekend we invited our wine club members to the vineyard to taste the new vintage of our most popular wine, our still Silent Pool Rosé. They were the first people to taste this new release from the 2018 harvest (made from grapes that the wine club had picked themselves!), and we wanted their input on a very important decision - the level of 'dosage'.

Silent Pool Rosé is a still wine, but we add dosage before bottling to balance its acidity, which is often high as a result of the grapes (pinot noir and pinot meunier) having been grown in our cool English climate. We asked the members to blind taste three samples of the rosé each with a different level of dosage added - 0g (zero dosage), 2g and 4g, and then to tell us their favourite.

Our winemaker Matthieu joined us for the tasting and explained how the term dosage is most commonly thought of as a stage of the sparkling wine making process that takes place between disgorging and final bottling, and refers to an amount of sugar that is added to the bottle. During the fermentation process, all the sugar in the original wine is converted to alcohol leaving the wine dry, so the level of dosage added determines how sweet the final product is. Even a wine that ends up dry may have a certain level of sugar added, often to balance acidity and add complexity. 

It's a tricky process, as the quantity of sugar is very small, but most were able to notice a difference in sweetness. And the result? A split decision! Whilst most of our wine club preferred the wine with 4g, a lot liked it with no dosage at all.

Silent Pool Rosé was served on the Royal Barge to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee in 2012. Since then it has gone on to wine several awards and sells out every year. The 2018 vintage will be released at the beginning of May. If you would like some, make sure you sign up to our newsletter at the bottom of our homepage to receive notification of the release. Interested in joining our wine club? Members receive invitations to events like this, and discounts on wine purchases. You can find out more here.

Many thanks to Jon Blackham for the photos