NEW YORK (Bloomberg) — Let’s be honest: Many wine lovers, including this one, cut our palates on rose wines like Lancer’s, Mateus and Riunite Lambrusco — all of them fizzy, all of them sweet, all of them real cheap.In fact, the moment I thought I’d become a sophisticate was when I broke out a bottle of Rose d’Anjou, which was neither fizzy nor sweet, for a “serious date”. That bottle must have set me back at least $4.

Most wine lovers, including me, grow up to relegate rose wines to some unvisited limbo between whites and reds. Roses are pale but pretty, appropriately drunk at a seaside bistro in Provence but certainly not something to serve with fine cuisine. I still believe that, even though more and more commendable rose wines now are produced in more and more countries.

Roses are made by crushing red grapes and allowing the skins to be in short contact — eight to 48 hours — with the juice to obtain a pink or salmon-like colour. The best known French roses are usually made from grenache in Tavel and Lirac in the southern Rhone valley, or from pinot noir in Burgundy and the Loire Valley. Some are made by simply adding a little red wine to white. They are all easy to drink, about 13 percent in alcohol, and take on some floral notes, though they’re still lightweight afterthoughts to better-known whites and reds.

In Spain roses are called rosados, in Italy rosatos, in South Africa Blanc de Noir and in California, more often than not, blush wines, including the once-faddish white zinfandel.

I’m told there has been a slow rise in interest in roses at US restaurants, which may be due to the wider range of good Spanish and Italian examples that tend to be somewhat deeper in colour and flavour.

“Roses are becoming something of a passion among sommeliers,” William Rhodes, wine director for New York’s Carlyle Hotel, told me in a phone interview. “And that gets passed on to the guests, who say they only remember roses like white zinfandel. But a lot of winemakers are now making rose well from different varietals, and they’re meant to be drunk young and in massive quantities.”

I assembled a slew of roses along with a BLT sandwich to taste them with. The salty, smoky bacon, the sweetness and tang of the tomato and the crisp lettuce seemed to bring out the best in the wines. I also might have served a salade nicoise or perhaps some grilled mackerel or bluefish with a squirt of lemon.

My overall reaction was that the deeper the rose hue, the richer the flavour, and the older the rose, the more it has to lose. Thus, as an experiment, I tasted a Spanish Vina Tondonia Crianza 1995 ($25) whose salmon colour was tinged with a tell-tale brown. The wine had oxidised a long time ago and was undrinkable.

The rest were all from 2005 or 2006. The palest of these — just barely pink — was a Robert Sinskey Vineyards Vin Gris of Pinot Noir 2006 ($20) from California’s Napa Valley. Even without much colour, it had a nice acidic bite on the palate and a hint of sweet fruit beneath, finishing well if not brilliantly.

Copain Le Printemps Rose 2005 ($18), despite its French name, comes from Mendocino County in California. It had a deep rosy hue and plenty of fruit, though barely any bouquet at all, and faded fast. Its principal virtue was that it was refreshing.

Two French examples proved very different but very dull. Chateau de Passavant 2006 ($18) from the Loire Valley had an odd, distastefully herby flavour, not unlike dry anisette, which might be all right with a Marseilles bouillabaisse or fennel tart with sardines but not much else. Mas du Fadan Cotes du Ventoux 2006 ($12) showed true to form as a Rhone, making no dents in my palate with any degree of pleasure.

The two deepest-coloured wines I tried were easily the best. Crios de Susana Balbo Rose of Malbec 2006 from Argentina was not only well priced at $12 but a really lovely wine, quite rich in bouquet and body, ruby red with raspberry flavours and a long finish.

Best of all was an Italian wine that I might characterise as a light red rather than a rose — Antichi Vigneti di Cantalupo Il Mimo Colline Novaresi Nebbiolo 2006 ($15), with a big cherry aroma and flavour. It’s a mouth-filling wine that’s a lot better than most whites from the same territory of Ghemme.

These last two roses I would drink with pleasure as an aperitif or with light summer foods, charcuterie, cheeses and especially oily fish like salmon, mackerel, mullet and bluefish. The rest I wouldn’t much care to drink again.

I did, for a moment, think of trying some Mateus or Lancer’s just for fun, but by then I’d run out of BLT.