Dry rosé

Rosé gets its colour from a few hours of contact between juice and black grape skins, then the skins are removed. For still wine in the EU, blending red and white wine to make rosé is not permitted — Champagne is the notable exception.

Colour is a poor guide to quality or even to sweetness. Provence made pale rosé fashionable, which led to a widespread but unfounded belief that paler is better; deeply coloured Spanish and Italian rosés are frequently drier and more structured.

Good dry rosé has enough acidity and body to handle grilled fish, charcuterie, salads and Mediterranean food generally.

Rosé is made in three quite different ways, and the method changes the wine more than the grape does. Direct press — whole bunches pressed immediately, as in Provence — gives the palest and most delicate style. Short maceration gives more colour, fruit and structure. And saignée, bleeding off juice from a fermenting red vat, gives the deepest and fullest, and exists partly to concentrate the red wine left behind.

Blending red and white wine is not permitted for still rosé in the EU. It is permitted for rosé Champagne, which is the single most common exception people know without knowing why.

Dry rosé is genuinely dry: the category's reputation for sweetness comes from off-dry blush wines, principally White Zinfandel, which are a separate thing and are labelled differently.

It is the most useful wine for a mixed table. Rosé handles the range from salad to grilled meat better than either a white or a red, and it is the reliable answer when the food is varied and nobody wants to open two bottles.