Cat Lomax

There was a time, not so long ago, when reaching for the rosé was something that happened on holiday in the South of France, or while visiting a relative with a fondness for semi-sweet Mateus. Luckily, times have changed, with sales of rosé climbing as the temperature rises. So what are the best supermarket rosé wines on the shelves this summer?

Samantha O’Keefe made her Lismore Estate Syrah with 50% whole bunches in 2016, maintaining a sense of freshness and tension in a warm vintage When Mark Dearing and I organised the first ‘Ten Years On’ tasting of South Africa’s New Wave wines in May last year, our hope was that it would become an annual fixture in the London trade calendar, so we were thrilled to host the second edition in May 2026, reviewing the New Wave’s 2016 wines.

London Dry Gin remains the benchmark style for many gin drinkers. Its origins can be traced back to the 18th century and the ‘gin craze’, when heavy taxation on French wine and Cognac, combined with tax breaks for spirits production, led to a boom in at-home distillation across England. Gin became cheap and widely available, but quality control was virtually non-existent, with some illicit spirits reportedly containing everything from sawdust and turpentine to sulphuric acid.