Rosé wine is a category forever walking a tightrope stretched between the stifled yawns of been there/done that/jumped sharks, on one side, and OMFG on the other. Treacherously off-dry rosé was the lifeblood of the boomer generation, and I suppose that cheap, sweet Mateus Rosé and Mondavi “white” zinfandel were the first wines many boomers drank too much of and lived to regret it. Those boomers may have been your mother, or your grandmother. When I hear the dismissive phrase “mom wine,” I despise it for its tacit misogyny but also the implication that mom can never know best; today few younger folks admit to drinking such wines and profess a preference for rosé without residual sugar. And for several years, we all seemed perfectly content to refresh our parched throats with tankfuls of dry, chilled rosé during the summer without pausing and asking why, until we discovered the possibility of drinking chilled red wine and orange wine and rosé was deemed abruptly passé, rarely circling back to white again which is just too basic.

And lost in the glinting, effulgent chandelier that is our collective preferences is the ontology of the rosé—what in the hell is it, anyway? Is it just adult Kool-Aid, an infantile pleasure of days gone by, or a wine for those who are just too indecisive and cannot make up their minds if they want a white or a red? Complicating this is the fact that there is no precise definition for what it is that makes a rosé wine. Some wines classified as such are made much as any red wine is made, with the winemaker pressing the grapes early, extracting just a bit of pigment and extract (the longer a red wine macerates with the skins of the grapes, the more darkly pigmented it becomes, up to a point); others are made from bleeding off some of the juice destined for red wine, resulting in a portion of lightly pigmented pinks juice and a portion of now more concentrated red; and yet others are made by back-blending in a bit of red wine into white (and then there is the category defiling co-fermentation of red and white grapes). And then there are red grapes such as poulsard prëmetta which rarely acquire a lot of pigment, regardless of how long the grapes hang on the vine.

Today, there are a myriad of techniques that one might employ in making rosé, some of which are archaic, and some of which are not. Tonight, we are tasting a myriad of different rosés, without any attempt at providing an encyclopedic sampling of the rosé universe. One of the wines we’re tasting is from Clos Cibonne: barrel aged for one year in ancient barrels, it undergoes biological aging, during which a coating of yeast develops naturally inside the barrels, coating the wine, protecting it from undue oxidation but also metabolizing some of the alcohol and imparting a unique, savory note to the wine. One of the wines we are tasting tonight is named “Claré,” in reference to an old-fashioned sort of pale Bordeaux and might easily be classified as either a light red or dark rosé; another, from Italy’s Adriatic coast, is a cerasuolo (“cherry”), which is neither a dark rose or light red: it’s simply cerasuolo.