Summer Forecast? Rosé All Day!

Whether you’re heading to the beach, the pool or a picnic in wine country, simple food (and drinks) are the best. This month’s recipe combines two of our favorite summer treats — popsicles and rosé. It’s a refreshing blend of fresh peaches, orange juice and California rosé frozen into Popsicle form. It’s a playful (adults-only), thirst-quenching treat that everyone loves. Get the recipe below.

What Type of Wine is Good for Summer?

There are no hard and fast rules as to what type of wine is good for summer sipping, though some people prefer chilled whites for obvious reasons. We think that summertime is the perfect opportunity to get playful both with food and wine. While we don’t recommend that anyone gets too rigid about it — after all, summertime is a time for relaxing — we do have a few suggestions to get you started:

1. Acid goes with acid – Acidic food tends to mask acidity in wine, so when you’re enjoying acidic foods (think fresh tomatoes, citrus or salads with zingy dressings) choose an acidic wine. Excellent options include Sauvignon Blanc, dry Riesling, Chenin Blanc or a crisp Chardonnay.
2. Try chilling your red – If you’re a red lover, despite what you may have heard, it is absolutely OK to chill your reds. Lighter wines like Pinot Noir, Grenache and Dolcetto are excellent choices for chilling, especially younger vintages. Red wines made using carbonic maceration are also delicious when served chilled.
3. Make a wine cocktail – Not to diss sangrias and mimosas (which are indeed delicious if not ubiquitous), but there’s a whole world of wine cocktails waiting to be discovered that take advantage of summer’s bounty (see recipe below for one idea). Here are a few of our favorite summer wine cocktails to enjoy.
4. Can it – More California wine brands are trying their hand at both still and sparkling canned wines. They are perfect to tote along to a picnic, and great to use in a wine cocktail when an entire bottle might be more than you need. Bonus — canned wines are widely viewed as a sustainable choice and more premium labels are starting to offer them.

Summer In the Vineyard

You’re not the only one who needs to quench their thirst in summer. Heat waves and dry conditions keep winegrowers on their toes all summer long. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention, and California farmers — whether growing winegrapes, avocados, lettuce or peaches — have leveraged new technologies to water their crops creatively and sustainably. 

Deficit irrigation has become increasingly popular among California winegrowers. They use a few different technologies to help them measure when grapevines go into deficit or stress and water only during those times. Drip irrigation is applied only where and when it’s needed to reduce evaporation and water waste. While vines that are watered in this way tend to have lower yields than traditionally irrigated crops, the trade-off is that the grapes have more concentrated flavors and produce higher-quality wines. Other winegrowers have dry-farmed vineyards, meaning that they don’t irrigate their crops at all. Vines grown in this way develop deep taproots that can access underground water.