Apparently there’s quite a bit of misconception about how rosé wine is made, so of course grapefriend is here to clarify it all for you. The three ways you can make this delicious stuff is as follows:

common way

Red grapes are crushed and the skins usually stay in contact with the juice for a few days or sometimes even just a few hours, turning the juice pink. (Red wines, by contrast, stay in contact with the juice for a longer amount of time, making the wine a darker red.)

saignée way

If they’re making red wine, rose is just a by-product of red wine where some of the freshly-pressed juice is siphoned off and then fermented on its own. This gives the wine a little more tannin and color. Saignée means “bled” (like they bled off some of the wine) but it’s far more fun to say san-YAY.

loser way

The last way you can make rosé is just by blending red and white wine together, but this is super lame and actually isn’t allowed in most wine growing regions now because the quality goes down. I mean, you’re taking two properly made wines and then mixing them together as if they were a rum and Coke. Ew. Blending is forbidden in France – except when they make rosé Champagne.

bubbly way

For sparkling rosé, all of the above gets turned on its head. Blending is actually the preferred method, where some red wine is added to the base wine (which is white) before the secondary fermentation. The more red wine, the deeper the color will be. Less common is the saignée way, where the base wine soaks up color from the grape skins as it ferments in the tank and then wine gets bled off the skins before it turns fully red. For sparkling, however, both ways make good rosé so drink a lot of it!