When Phocaean Greeks founded Massalia — Marseille — some 2,600 years ago, they planted France's first vines, and the wine they made from briefly macerated grapes was pale. Provence rosé is the heir of that antiquity: the country's oldest vineyard never stopped making light-coloured wine while the rest of France turned dark.
The modern style is deliberate and technical — grenache, cinsault and syrah pressed directly and cold, the juice drawn off pale as onion skin and fermented in steel to keep redcurrant, peach and wet stone intact. Since the 2000s Côtes de Provence has been the world benchmark for rosé, its pallor copied from Chile to South Africa; the original remains a wine to drink young, cold, and by the sea.