Nyetimber Rosé, Sussex, England NV (£31.49, Waitrose) Drinking pink champagne on Valentine’s Day is, I realise, hardly the most spontaneous or original act of love. It is the drink the Valentine’s industry tells us we can’t do without – a vehicle for the wine business to prey on our insecurities and carve out a piece of that lucrative territory held by florists and greetings card companies. Well, cynicism be damned: of all the daft fabricated traditions on this daftest and most commercialised of festive occasions, pink champagne is the one I’m happiest to indulge. This is a style that has improved beyond measure in the past 20 years. Winemakers have been treating it much more seriously than they used to, and making a lot more of it, too (today rosé accounts for 10% of all champagne production; it was a mere 2% in 2000). Something similar has happened on this side of the channel, too: English fizz makers are mastering wines with the sensual pink tint and, in Nyetimber’s impeccable case, gorgeous tumbling red fruit flavours.
Domaine Julien Sunier Wild Soul Beaujolais Villages 2020 (bbr.com; robersonwine.com) Other seductive pink sparkling wines to charm your beloved tomorrow include the pillow-soft, aromatic, mellifluous (and mellifluously named) Fuchs & Hase Pet Nat Rosé from Austria (£20.40, peckhamcellars.co.uk); the punchy herby cherry-berry Co-op Cava Rosado Brut NV (£6.95, The Co-op) and the plump, satin-textured and tropically fruit-fragrant Ruinart Rosé Champagne NV (£69, jeroboams.co.uk). Do red sparkling wines count? Few would fail to be won over by the easy natural charm of Casa Belfi Rosso Bio Frizzante, which comes from Prosecco country, is made in the traditional way where the wine re-ferments in the bottle, and which has a gentle supple food-friendly cherry crunch and bite. For those looking for a Valentine’s without bubbles, in France the Valentine’s industry would push you towards a bottle from a particular village in Beaujolais: St-Amour. Domaine Billards 2019 (£15.99) is a bright, berry-filled delight. But, while it may not have the loving name on the label, Domaine Julien Sunier’s Beaujolais-Villages bottling has a real silky, slinky allure.
Taste the Difference Gewürztraminer, Alsace, France (£9, Sainsbury’s) Can a wine be sexy? The term does get used rather a lot in the wine-selling and wine-writing world, although generally it’s as a bloodless, blokeish term of appreciation, rather than something more interestingly kinky. But some wines really do have a certain x-rated je ne sais quoi. There is, for example, something very sexy about really great pinot noir reds from Burgundy. That has a lot to do with their sheer silk-sheeted texture. But it’s also in the way these wines, especially older wines, have something elusively animal in their fragrance, which gives them the same kind of mysterious, elemental pull that you find in really good, handmade French perfume. Something similar happens with Alsace’s gewürztraminer. When it’s young, it’s all about heady, dizzying rose-petal perfume, as you find in Sainsbury’s very attractive bottling. Try a mature bottle from a great producer such as Zind-Humbrecht or Marcel Deiss, however, and you’ll find yourself having a whole other, more adult multi-sensory experience.
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