Longtime wine drinkers remember what passed in the U.S. as rosé wines in the 1960s and 1970s — Mateus and Lancers, imports which were somewhat sweet and slightly sparkling pink wines.

Or, for those who wanted still wines, the most common were pink wines made from the grenache grape. The one thing that most of them had in common was they were slightly sweet.

Then along came white zinfandel, which also was on the sweeter side, and since it was considered a “blush” wine, it pretty much took over that section on retailers’ shelves. As a result, “true” wine drinkers began to shy away from rosés.

One problem with rosé wines in days past was that they often were the product of whatever grapes were left over after crush: “We have a half-ton of merlot left over, so let’s make a rosé,” was probably a common comment around wine cellars.

Another practice used to make rosé wines was to blend a little red wine with white wine, but this method has pretty well disappeared. One winemaker admitted that some rosés resulted from a few mistakes in the winery by pumping over some red wine in to a white fermentation.

Since the recent renaissance and resurrection of rosés (and maybe the cause of it), many winemakers are deliberately making rosé and some are making what is called a dedicated rosé — they press red grapes with the sole purpose of making a rosé. Since the color of wine comes from the skins, they remove the juice from the skins quickly while it is still pinkish in color. Then as it is fermented the yeast consumes the natural grape sugars, and the result is a dryer style wine. Many are using “native yeasts” or white wine yeasts to retain the fruity esters, or flavor compounds.

The other principal technique of making rosé wine is the saignée (pronounced sahn-yay and meaning “bleed” in French) method, which involves removing, or bleeding off, some juice of red wines shortly after it goes into a fermentation tank. Because there is less juice fermenting on the same amount of skins, the remaining red wine takes more intensity from the skins both in color and flavor as it ferments, and the drained-off pink wine undergoes a separate fermentation. Technically, the resulting rosé could be called a by-product of the red winemaking process, but in most cases it’s deliberate and some excellent rosés have been made by this method. They can be fermented in stainless steel tanks, stainless steel barrels or oak barrels for different textural characteristics — stainless steel being the most fresh and fruity and the oak (usually more neutral oak) having a little more mouthfeel at the expense of a little fruit.

Rosé wines can be made from just about any red grapes. A random examination of several dozen Napa Valley winery Web sites revealed just that — rosés are made from these grapes: cabernet sauvignon, merlot, cabernet franc, malbec, sangiovese, pinot noir, syrah, zinfandel, primitivo, petite sirah, carmenère, grignolio, valdiguie (also known as Napa gamay), and yes, even grenache. A popular rosé in France is made from the gamay grape in Beaujolais. There are probably even more.

Many rosés are made from a combination of several grapes, such as cabernet sauvignon/merlot, cabernet franc/merlot, cabernet sauvignon/primitivo, valdiguie/petite sirah, and one winery combined merlot with syrah and gewürztraminer. The combinations can be endless.

That’s why rosés taste so different.