On a perfect early May afternoon, I biked the length of Central Park to Midtown, noting along the way pink cherry blossoms, pink azaleas, and pink dogwood. Up onto my vinous color chart came wine of the same hues: the roses, well chilled, which will soon be accompanying picnics with family and friends now that a chilly spring is finally about to be nudged aside by the approach of long June days and evenings.

Presciently, the Council on Provencal Wines was hosting a tasting that afternoon at the D & D Building, which is where my trusty red road bike was taking me. No other wine region is so devoted to rose as Provence, where it accounts for an astonishing 80% of the region’s annual production of 180 million bottles in the three main appellations of Cotes de Provence, Coteaux d’Aix, and Coteaux Varois. So seriously do local growers take their pale quaff that they have created a Center for Research and Experimentation on Rose Wines in the town of Vidauban. It’s only the making of the wine that’s serious, however. “Rose is all about refreshment,” said Alain Baccino, director of the research center. “Expressivity comes second. Yet rose wines are perhaps the most difficult to vinify, because they are so fragile. You really have to be expert.”

Rose’s difficulty, here in America, is that the wine gets little respect. “We have all sorts of fears about what pink wine is,” said Charles Bieler, a young American sporting a pink derby hat who was pouring wines from Chateau Routas in the Coteaux Varois. “When people here look at pink wine, they automatically think it’s cheap.” That prejudice reared up at home the very next day, when my normally liberal wife asked me to pick out a couple of bottles of wine to bring to work to toast a colleague who was retiring.

“Red or white?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” she answered, “just don’t shame me with rose.” A similar reaction had come from friends in Easthampton, last summer, when I suggested that a rose would be nice for a poolside wedding supper they were hosting. They wouldn’t hear of it. Yet were we all to be sitting in a chic outdoor cafe in Nice eating (what else?) salad Nicoise or slurping bouillabaisse in Marseille, a bottle of rose would probably be in our table-side ice bucket, as well as in that of most of the rest of the undoubtably sophisticated diners.

So what’s our problem with rose? There’s a conceptual hurdle here: Wine is supposed to be white or red. Rose seems to be neither. In fact, rose is typically vinified from red wine grapes. But juice and skins, instead of being allowed to macerate and ferment together over days or weeks, are separated in a matter of hours, so that the juice can go on fermenting on its own. The result of this brief liaison is that the juice takes on just a tinge of pink or copper hue rather than the true red that more skin contact would bring. A small addition of red wine to a white wine can also produce a rose, a technique favored in champagne. Unusually for a pink wine, rose champagne (like ultrapricey Dom Perignon Rose) can be more expensive than “white” champagne, lending extra cachet to what is already perceived as the most prestigious of all wines.

While Americans are resistant to wines called rose, a twist in terminology can make all the difference. If Bob Trinchero of California’s Sutter Home Vineyards had bottled a zinfandel rose back in the 1980s, it might have gathered dust on retail shelves. Instead, he called that off-dry, slightly fizzy quaff white zinfandel, and the rest is history. As late as the mid-1990s, a quarter of all wine produced in California was white zinfandel, although some avoided the “r” word by calling their pink stuff “blush” wines. So long as the wine wasn’t labeled as rose, and that it was off-dry, consumers embraced it.

Yet another hurdle for wines called rose is that Americans prefer to buy by grape name, which white zinfandel gave them the chance to do. But most rose wines are blends of grapes, and fairly unfamiliar ones at that. In Provence, for example, rose’s workhorse varieties include Grenache, Cinsault, and Mourvedre, none of which have much chance of becoming consumer bywords. Goats Do Roam Rose, from South Africa, is made from no less than nine varieties, but attracts customers with its clever name and labeling. The same goes for Bonny Doon’s Vin Gris de Cigare made by the California iconoclast and marketing genius Randall Grahm.

In general, however, roses by any name are not made much of in California’s top viticultural areas. “When you’ve paid $100,000 per acre for vineyard land in Sonoma County,” esteemed winemaking consultant Zelma Long told me, “you aren’t too interested in making rose.” Provencal vineyard land may not be cheap either, but as Ms. Long noted, ownership there typically goes back to previous generations. Provence, in fact, boasts that it was the first region in France to grow vines, and that rose was its first wine.

“What we’ve learned about rose in Provence is simple,” said the pink-hatted Mr. Beiler as I sampled his Rouviere Rose. “When the weather turns summery, it’s not about complexity or tannins. You just want a wine that is crisp, crisp, crisp.”

Recommended Roses

CHATEAU POURCIEUX 2003, COTES DE PROVENCE ($8.99)
More orange than pink, with intensely etched strawberry and cassis flavors and aromas. Has fullness along with zip. It well represents the roses of Provence at the right price. At K & D, 1366 Madison Ave., 212-289-1818.

CHARLES MELTON ROSE OF VIRGINIA, AUSTRALIA ($13.99)
Delivers a wave of flavor from Down Under. They’d hardly know what to do with this level of lip-smacking richness in Provence. Made to go to the mat (the picnic mat, that is) with slices of cold roast beef. At Astor Wines, 12 Astor Place, 212-674-7500.

MARSANNAY ROSE, ROTY, 2002 ($19.99)
From a maker of often-stony red burgundies that need long aging, this wine is seductive and velvety from the get-go, yet has verve, as a rose must. At Astor Wines.

WOLFFER ESTATE SAGPOND ROSE 2003, LONG ISLAND ($13.99)
Some French roses may not travel well, but this one is local. Very Provencal in style: bone dry, with a beam of red berry fruit and a touch of almondy bitterness in the finish. At Vintage New York, 2492 Broadway, 212-721-9999, and 482 Broome St., 212-226-9463.

ROSE D’UN JOUR 2003, SANSONNIERE ($19.99)
From Anjou in the Loire, but not permitted to carry an appellation, due to atypicality. But what a wine! Spilling over with peach, honey, and gingery flavors, it’s full and flowery. At Chambers Street Wine, 160 Chambers St., 212-227-1434.

IL SPARKLING ROSE, MIONETTO ($10.99)
A new product from the Italian Prosecco maker. Lightly carbonated, fairly low in alcohol at 10.5%. Also low in character, but this is wine for drinking, not thinking, and has the virtue of being sealed with an easily pulled crown cap. At Astor Wines.