Rosé in May.

Sometimes snubbed as a lightweight for the uninitiated, rosé wine is coming into its own! And this is the perfect time of year to pull a cork and drink pink.

Typically, red wine comes from red grapes, and white wine comes from white grapes…but where are the pink grapes? Nope, that’s not how it works (although there are grapes that are light red :). Rosé wine can be made from just about any red grape varietal, but rather than leaving the skins in the wine for weeks, the skins are only left in the wine for hours (as in 2 - 20 hours). The longer the skins are in, the darker the color.

As a nod to your inner geek, I’ll give you a peak at three methods for making rosé. The maceration method is most common: The grapes are de-stemmed and placed in a vat to “macerate.” After the winemaker determines the appropriate color and flavor have been reached, the skins are filtered out and the remaining wine continues on to fermentation. With the “bled” method, red wine is bled after a few hours to pull off the lightly-tinged wine while the bulk of the wine continues on its journey to redness. The two wines are fermented separately. And finally, the blending method (uncommon except in sparkling wine) consists of adding a bit (perhaps 5%) of finished red wine to finished white wine to get the pink profile.

The genius of rosé is the sheer diversity of stylistic interpretations available as well as the spectrum of foods it can pair with. It can be sweet, dry, or off-dry. It can be crisp with crabapple and tart cherry…or luscious with honeydew and strawberries. And fabulous as a bubbly. Rosé blurs the obvious lines between pairing white or pairing red, opening an exciting new world of possibilities.

Spice up your next fish or poultry entrée with this magical elixir, remembering of course to pair the body of the wine to the sauce, not the protein: lighter rosé for olive oil or cream sauce, meatier rosé for red sauce. But which rosés, pray tell? Here are my current faves, and you’ll notice I have a preference for French pink.

• Big Pink: Tavel. Savory and rich from the Rhone Valley, very close to the legendary Châteauneuf du Pape region.

• Light Pink: Provence. Fresh, crisp, and dry from the southeast coastal corner of France.

• Bubbly Pink: Jacqueline Leonne Méthode Champenoise Rosé, about $15. (OK, it’s not French, but it sounds French!)

Santé!