How much will you pay for rosé?

If you’re looking for a fancy red wine or a high-end white, you’ll expect to pay real money. But nobody expects a pricey rosé. What’s up with that?

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In a world in which the most sought-after red wines from Bordeaux or Burgundy, Napa or Barossa can rise into four figures, well beyond most of our budgets, rosé wine rarely rises above the teens.

The most expensive rosé wine in Wine-Searcher's database, Chateau d'Esclans Cotes de Provence Garrus Rosé, struggles to make it above the three-figure mark at a $123 average U.S. retail price.

One of the most highly regarded Provencal rosé wines, Domaine Tempier Bandol Rosé, lists a $63 average U.S. retail price and is well worth it.

But even those rosy delights are distinct outliers in the pink-wine market. So, again, why is rosé so relatively cheap?

I think there are a couple of reasons for this:

• It's easy to produce. Press grapes, then quickly drain off the juice while it's still light pink. Canny producers can actually double-dip here, making a batch of rosé from that first pressing, then going on to make a red wine from the darker juice that remains behind. What's more, rosé is rarely if ever aged in expensive oak barrels. In fact, it's not usually aged at all – its fresh, crisp flavor is a selling point – so it moves quickly to market and turns an easy profit.

• Perhaps because it's easy to make rosé fast and it's cheap, rosé doesn't have the greatest reputation. The "blush" wine phenomenon, with sweet, flamingo-pink White Zinfandel leading the charge, didn't do much to enhance rosé's reputation among wine lovers. It's simply not seen as the kind of complex, nuanced, and interesting drink that we expect from a fine wine.

But there have always been exceptions, and good rosé is beginning to earn a better reputation. Provence in Southern France, where more than half of the wine produced is pink, may be the most obvious exception, but its neighbor, Languedoc-Roussillon, is also a rising star. Indeed, just about every wine region around the world is making good rosé now. So if you still have that “never-pink” attitude, this might be a very good time to give pink wine another try.

“What is a rosé wine? Rosé wine is neither a light red wine nor a tinted white wine. It’s a unique wine in its own right,” declares the Swiss producer Les Celliers de Sion. “Its color, aromas and structure depend on the way it’s made.”

But first, one more tip: The conventional wisdom suggests serving rosé wine ice cold, to make it extra refreshing for summer sipping. Please don't do that with a quality rosé though. Ice-cold beverages stun our taste buds and conceal just the complex flavors that we're paying extra to enjoy. A cool cellar temperature around 55º is plenty refreshing without killing the wine's good flavor.

This week's featured wine, Weingüt Brundlmayer 2025 Langenlois Zweigelt Rosé is not at all a typical rosé. It's not from Provence but Austria, and it's made from the Austrian grape Zweigelt, not a name we traditionally associate with rosé. But it is very good, a pink wine that easily justifies its price in the middle $20 range.

Most of us will pay the price if we want a special red wine or even a fancy white. But we expect pink wine to be cheap. Are you willing to pay extra for a special rosé?

Because this week’s featured wineis priced well above $20, I have to leave it behind our subscription paywall. Because I buy all the wines I review at retail and do not accept wine samples or other gratuities from the industry, I rely on the support of paid subscribers to help cover the cost of the wines I review.

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