Add variety to spice up your shelves.

(From Off Licence News)

You would need to have been living in Outer Mongolia for the past five years not to know that growth in the market for rosA wine has outstripped all expectations. At first, the increased demand was attributed to the drought summer of 2003, when Brits went all continental and took to sunbathing in their lunch hour and eating evening meals on their back patios. But year-on-year sales have continued their upwards trend.

"The first thing we noticed about rosA sales was that seasonality started to erode," says Bibendum director Willie Lebus. "RosA has become part of everybody's regular drinking pattern. Demand has now driven retailers to provide a good rosA selection from around the world. In truth, I think the category is ill defined, because there are so many rosAs now made in such a range of styles that it's difficult to group them all together as arosA't." The boom began, of course, with California's blush and white Zinfandel wines. "These wines are the reinvention of Mateus RosA and RosA d'tAnjou for a new generation," says John McLaren, the UK director of the Wine Institute of California. "They'tre fruity, they'tve got some residual sugar and they'tre called awhite't or ablush't - anything but rosA." "It's the kind of drink that provides an entry point into the world of wine for a relatively unsophisticated consumer who may well have been drinking RTDs beforehand," says Simon Legge, wine marketing director for Brown-Forman. "Some of these consumers will stay with this style of wine, others may graduate to more serious wines with time. I suppose you could think of them as astarter wines't." But although sweeter rosAs sell well, they tend to sell at the lower end of the price spectrum.

"It's a slightly schizophrenic market," Legge confirms. "White Zin is more weighted to the mass-market end of things, whether you'tre talking about supermarkets or pub chains. On the other hand, it's not just the independents and lah-di-da restaurants that are the stronghold of dry rosAs - you'tll find plenty in the supermarkets and high street chains. And there is some crossover: Waitrose sells a lot of white Zinfandel and Wetherspoon's sells a lot of dry rosA, but the centre of gravity is slightly ...