I'd stumbled into a rosé tasting by mistake. All around the room – the main floor of the Prince Wine Store in South Melbourne – winemakers, importers and distributors had just begun to pour their latest offerings of rosés, rosados, rosats and rosatos from near and far: Bandol, Barossa, Burgenland, Bordeaux, Bendigo, Provence, Montsant, Rioja, Yarra Valley, McLaren Vale.

There were wines of every hue from pale raspberry to salmon copper, onion skin and oeil de perdrix (partridge eye). Happily, there was nary a fluoro-pink of yesteryear in sight. Indeed if I hadn't known I was accidentally at a rosé tasting I might not have identified the wines as such, some tints being so subtle as to be indiscernible to the deuteranomalous.