More than any other wine category, rosé is a mood. There is simply nothing better on a warm afternoon, a salve for sun-drenched, heat-driven thirst. It is more often gulped than sipped, never contemplated, rarely complicated.
But there is much to say about a bottle of rosé beyond "it's empty." It's made, after all, in a broad array of styles from nearly every red grape known to man, in nearly every wine region on Earth. So before your next gulp, read on; a wine with so many shades deserves a closer inspection. To begin, "rose" is just one of the colors it comes in. To it let's add ruby, copper, salmon, amber, almandine, maraschino, blood orange, madras and sunset and grapefruit pink, fuchsia, sepia, saffron, cayenne, pale rust and more. The wine is a painter's palette for the color red -- in fact, strictly speaking, many are a truer red than any red wines (which tend, of course, to be more purple).
You'd think these colors would provide clues to its taste -- the darker the hue the deeper the wine, for example. Sometimes, that's true. But dark wines can also be sweeter, softened by a secondary fermentation.
In fact, the pale ones often can deceive. The coppery rosés of Bandol belie the rigor of the grape variety Mourvedre, which girds these wines with well-built, earthy tannins. Ditto the even paler rosés of the Loire, which disguise in their prettiness the pleasingly bitter grip of Cabernet Franc.
Rosé gets its color from contact with the skins of red grapes -- and that color varies depending on the grape, and on how long the contact. But there are other factors, like how it's made. Sometimes the wine is a saignée, wherein the juice is "bled" off a larger tank of red wine (usually with the side intention of concentrating the latter). Sometimes, like a watercolor pigment, a rosé is the sum total of white and red juice.
Perhaps the best, however, are destined for rosé from the get-go, from vines grown toward that aim, with grapes allowed to macerate for a few hours or a day for color, pressed off, transformed by fermentation into the perfect sunny-day beverage.