Now and again I have indulged in a glass of rosé. As I recall I had my first one some time in the 1990s, when Australian winemakers began producing halfway drinkable examples at a student-friendly price.
They produce a lot of it where I am now, and I still find it to be a good option in summer. The better examples are crisp and dry with some fruit and hints of the more complex flavours of a red. It goes well when you might want to pair something with grilled meat but a red doesn’t match well with the weather.
I tried one, I liked it. Occasionally I bought another bottle, occasionally I still do. Lots of other people quite un-selfconsciously did the same, and it found a place on many bottle shop shelves and wine lists.
Or at least I imagined this is how it all happened - in the same unremarkable way other pleasant things spread, giving variety to the everyday pleasures of eating and drinking for men and women alike.
This week I learned I had actually been doing something deeply subversive.
It started when I read about how men in England were opting for rosé over beer.
The story, published in the Telegraph, was entirely based on a longer piece in Details magazine, which insisted on the basis of a some isolated hipster anecdotes gathered in the usual New York boroughs, that young men were “pounding pink”.
Like every spurious lifestyle trend, this tendency came with a portmanteau. The bros imbibing pink wine were part of the “brosé phenomenon”.
In Details, aspirational millennials with creative jobs were wheeled out to assure us that while they once would have felt self-conscious about drinking rosé, in the summer of 2015 they may finally “drink pink” without blushing.
For example, a guy called James told Details that while before “people would drink it, but it was often the butt of jokes ... I would definitely not feel self-conscious ordering it or drinking it now.”
It seems that even in the locker-room atmosphere of James’s profession – “fine art logistics” – men can now bear to watch other men drinking salmon-hued plonk without flicking towels and dishing out wedgies.
It turns out that people have been trying to turn brosé into a phenomenon for some time.
If you can bear it, there’s a YouTube video made last month where schlubby beer-and-whiskey blokes recruited by Fork ’n’ Plate go through the agony of brosé conversion on camera.
And as early as December last year, Nylon was whipping up the idea that rosé was trending with guys because, um, Rick Ross drinks it.
A more cynical journalist than your correspondent might conclude that this is all the result of a PR push by the wine industry to persuade heterosexual men that drinking rosé will not emasculate them.
That world-weary scribe might also note that the stuff is now being sold in tallboy cans, thus offering male converts the tantalising possibility that they “become the VERY FIRST BRO IN HISTORY to shotgun a can of brosé”.
And such a writer could also point to Washington Vintner Charles Smith, now plugging the stuff with the reassurance that “Yes, you can drink rosé and still be a badass”.
This can’t be true, because if it were, it would necessarily mean that there are a significant number of men in the world who think that drinking something Frenchy and pink will make their balls drop off.
It’s depressing, but perhaps no more so than the writer in Slate who spelled out at length how the pleasure he takes in grilling food outdoors makes him doubt his feminist credentials.
He wrote that he was “uncomfortable with the pleasure I take in something so conventionally masculine. Looming over the coals, tongs in hand, I feel estranged from myself, recast in the role of suburban dad.”
Perhaps a glass of rosé would hose down all that angst.
All this gives rise to a number of questions. Is it possible that marketers are reaping what they sowed when they unimaginatively pitched pink wine exclusively to women?
Is it possible for men of good conscience to support the feminist struggle without becoming paralysed by the thought of cooking outside or enjoying a glass of wine?
Is contemporary masculinity so wracked by crisis that men need constant reassurances to try things they might like, or to continue enjoying simple pleasures?
My answer is broportionate to the problem: Grill the meat. Drink the wine. And for pity’s sake, bro, relax.