Some people love it and some not; I am in the love category. A great luscious rose with 
plenty of fizz, dry but not bone dry - perfect.
Love it so much, in fact, that we had it at our wedding reception - with our own personalised label of course - twelve years ago; pioneers then as most quaffers only knew Laurent Perrier as THE rose champagne.
But the World has changed; all the big houses produce pink and some of the biggest brands have uber-premium vintage rose - think Veuve Clicquot Grande Dame rose - that is also uber-costly - £200+ as opposed to under £100 for the GD white 1998! Bollinger introduced their special pink to the market in 2008.
So what’s the difference? The usual vintage/non-vintage distinction applies, as does the blending process (different grapes and vineyards). Principally but obviously it is the colour: the old way of production was to macerate the skins of the black grapes - ie. allow the colour to bleed out into the pressing and then use this in the blend. The more modern way is conventional blending - adding still red wine (pinot noir normally) to the white blend at the time of bottling.
The paler more blush coloured pinks are typically from the maceration technique and to my mind are usually softer and more approachable. Just a personal opinion, though.
Either way, rose champagne is perfect for a special Wedding day, perfect for Valentine’s day, perfect for Mother’s day and equally perfect for every day; enjoy!
At the beginning of 2009 (and for the 14 years before), Park Lane was all about “private label champagne” or “own brand champagne” or maybe even “own label champagne”; never “personalised champagne”.
is what people think of when they want their own champagne - and we know this thanks to the mountain of information that Google collects, analyses and regurgitates so this cannot be wrong!
It is the little things that do count and with us the little things come as standard. If there was a measure of how far we came in 2009, it is probably not the number of bottles sold, not the conversion rate of online visitors to customers and not the cost per acquisition of a new customer. It is actually the significant number of customers who voluntarily contacted us to say how impressed they were by our levels of service, general customer care and attention to detail. All of which come as standard.
suffering with the same chill that the UK is - except that it is forecast to drop below -10c later this week. The vines are hibernating at the moment but prolonged temperatures of extreme cold can seriously damage the prospects for this year’s harvest. In January 1985, the temperature barely rose above -25c for several days and nearly 15% of the region’s entire vineyards needed replanting - 5,000 hectares in total; these frosts were retrospectively known as the “frosts of the century”.
