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Rosé: a fresh, fragrant wine with an irresistible pastel hue — yet it still causes confusion and scepticism.
Breaking away from the traditional choice between white and red, many still wonder if it’s made by mixing the two types.
Telling the story of a rosé is the best way to clarify the main aspects of winemaking, a topic that can be tricky for non-experts. Let’s bust a myth: in Italy, producing rosé by blending red and white wine is forbidden.
Rosé winemaking always uses red grapes. Using saignée must to make rosé is a practice common for lower-quality wines. The saignée technique means removing part of the must from freshly crushed red grapes to increase the skins-to-juice ratio, making a more concentrated red wine. The removed must, already tinted, is then used for rosé. But this often results in an unbalanced, harsh, and not very fresh rosé, because the grapes were harvested with advanced ripeness, low acidity and high sugar and polyphenol content (great for reds, but not for rosé). To produce high-quality rosé, red grapes must be harvested early — with the right balance of sugars, acidity, and fresh aromas — and then vinified like a white wine, with a short skins contact just to extract the colour. In 95% of grape varieties, colour is only in the skin, so some maceration is needed to colour the juice.
3S L’Aleatico Rosato
The 3S Aleatico Rosato was born in 2019, the latest addition to the 3S Sustainable Sulphite-Free line, after various trials by Trebotti.
The grape variety, one of the key native grapes of Tuscia, is Aleatico: a dark-skinned, semi-aromatic grape rich in typical wild rose aromas due to its high terpene content, which hints at an ancient Muscat link.
Probably brought by the Greeks to Salento (Magna Graecia), it reached Tuscia — the area of Lake Bolsena (Vulsini volcanic complex) — thanks to the Etruscans (Italy’s first vine growers and winemakers) more than 2,500 years ago. The most accepted name origin comes from “Lugliaticum”, referring to its early ripening in July on the island of Crete, its likely origin. Since then, it has remained one of Tuscia’s most symbolic grapes, and Aleatico di Gradoli was Italy’s second registered DOC (1972).
Ludovico, owner and agronomist of Trebotti, is one of the world’s top Aleatico experts: in 2001 he started studying this complex variety for his thesis and has continued ever since, experimenting with techniques to enhance quality in the vineyard and cellar. In 2010, about one hectare of Aleatico was planted on the estate, using the first registered Aleatico clone in Italy — selected during Ludovico’s thesis — and today Trebotti produces both 3S L’Aleatico Rosato and Bludom Aleatico Passito.
Harvest for this wine takes place from late August to early September and is quite unique.
Grapes for the rosé are hand-picked during thinning: only the less coloured bunches are selected. The riper, more coloured grapes are left on the vines to fully ripen for the passito. The more shaded, paler grapes are higher in acidity and freshness, with lower sugar — the perfect balance for producing a sulphite-free rosé.
The grapes arrive at the winery early in the morning, still cool and whole, and go straight to gentle pressing in an oxygen-free environment for about two hours. This gentle step breaks the berries slightly, colouring the juice a delicate pink while preserving the unique Aleatico aromas. These two hours decide the character of 3S L’Aleatico Rosato: some anthocyanins and polyphenols (natural antioxidants and red pigment molecules) transfer from the skins to the juice, giving the rosé its hue. For red wine, this contact can last weeks; for this rosé, after two hours the juice is separated from skins and seeds and continues its special stainless steel fermentation without added sulphites, protected from oxygen and with strict temperature control to keep the aromas intact.
The final wine has a typical “onion skin” colour with marked acidity, savouriness and minerality (thanks to the volcanic soils), making it fresh, pleasant and fragrant.
It shows intense wild rose notes and great versatility with food: perfect fresh and chilled as an aperitif or with seafood, shellfish and fish dishes, but also suitable for white meat and legumes.
The 3S L’Aleatico Rosato is bottled in ultra-light bottles (lower CO₂: less glass, fewer raw materials, less energy for production and transport, less waste). Each bottle (like all 3S line wines) is elegantly finished with a rigid label made of recycled paper mixed with cotton, with a slight overhang at the top — more room to tell the story of the wine, the winery, and its sustainability projects. The overhang also works as a drip-catcher. The label is secured with a wax seal instead of glue, so it can easily be removed and kept (or given as a keepsake) to remember the wine.
