Mediterranean rosé wines enjoy great prestige.

All around the world, wine drinkers are rediscovering the pleasures of rosé wine and starting to appreciate the subtleties of this most refreshing of wine styles. With Valentine Day just one week away, it seems an appropriate time to highlight the virtues of this wine ‘underdog’.

When the majority of wine lovers reach for a wine list to select a wine, most automatically think white or red, and very few consider the third option of a rosé. In actual fact, and in many instances, rosé wines are far more consumer friendly than many whites or reds, and are a good all rounder, especially when it comes to pairing them with our Mediterranean cuisine.

For many years, rosé wines – even from famous wine-growing regions – were, more often than not, bland, fruitless and pretty boring. But in recent years the winemakers of Europe and the New World are putting as much effort into making their rosé wines as they do for their reds and whites. The results are there for all to taste: better wines with more flavour.

Rosé wines produced around the shores of the Mediterranean enjoy great prestige and no less so the rosé wines of Malta, which have proved to be in a class of their own. They are crisp, fruit-driven, remarkably refreshing, have more longevity than most rosé wines and are extremely versatile, meaning they can be enjoyed equally with or without food.

Two great examples for lovers of serious dry styles of rosé wine are the Medina Rosé Grenache DOK Malta and the Victoria Heights Rosé Shiraz DOK Gozo. However, although Shiraz (Syrah) and Grenache grapes are grown in Malta and Gozo, they are not indigenous to our country.

Those who want something truly native and unique can try a rosé wine produced from Malta’s very own Ġellewża grape variety, like Delicata’s award-winning Ġellewża Frizzato. If ever there was a wine made for the Maltese summertime or a celebration like Valentine’s Day, this is it. Just get it nice and cold, serve it in nice, elegant flutes and enjoy. It’s the perfect celebratory wine and really convenient now that it comes with a screw cap closure.

Others who love their rosé sweet can opt for three unique medium dry rosé wines: Dolcino, probably Malta’s most popular rosé, made from an exclusive blend of grape varieties; Pjazza Regina Rosé, which is made from a blend of Syrah and Carignan, two grape varieties that complement each other perfectly; and the Maltese Falcon which is made entirely from the Ġellewża grape.

Chilled rosé wines make the perfect pre-dinner aperitif or celebratory wine, but they are equally a great wine accompaniment to lighter flavoured foods. They are particularly good with Maltese fish like paġell (red bream) and skorfna (rock fish) or other Maltese seafood specialities like octopus and calamari, pasta with sea urchins or assorted shellfish platters.

Rosé wines also make the perfect picnic wine and go well with most salads. They are much underrated and often overlooked when looking for a wine partner for Asian dishes, especially the sweeter cuisines like Chinese and Malaysian and even some Thai dishes.

One of the most important things to be wary of, however, when buying rosé wines, is the vintage. As a basic rule of thumb, for most of the world’s rosés, the younger the better.

And at this time of year you should be able to find rosé wines from the latest 2013 vintage readily available.