One night earlier this summer, a group of six women filed into a corner booth at Mamo, a Manhattan transplant of the very popular restaurant Mamo Le Michelangelo in the French Riviera. But before they sat down, the queen bee with crown crafted by Drybar, whose vibrant turquoise handbag matched her cocktail dress, asked the host, “And is this where Beyoncé sat?”

It was!

The group tittered as they took their seats, which must have simply vibrated with the memory of Beyoncé. You only get connections to celebrities like this—ass to ass—in New York. Soon their wine arrived, a few bottles you could identify as rosé from Provence without even seeing the label, the corset shape of the bottle a signifier of the region. It was Domaines Ott, one of the most classic rosés on the market.

Rosé and Beyoncé: two pillars of modern womanhood that we could pack into a time capsule for future generations to unwrap, alongside an iPhone, maybe. (“This wine looks spoiled,” the future people would say, “and they forgot to pack a charger.”) But while the all-consuming cultural dominance of Beyoncé is relatively easy to plot, the rise of rosé is a different story. One day—some time in the late mid-aughts maybe?—it was just . . . everywhere. Each summer, from the beaches of Bridgehampton to the rooftops of Bushwick (and points west too, probably), upper-crust revelers and urbanite millennials on the make alike guzzle glasses of the stuff. It has become both a symbol of, and necessity for, that luxury lifestyle Shangri-La so many are aiming for (at least by the looks of Instagram). Rosé, at this point, has gone around the guilty-pleasure/irony wheel so thoroughly that when the Fashion Internet’s favorite bad boy, The Fat Jewish, began marketing his own line of the stuff earlier this summer hardly anyone could be bothered to care about its name: White Girl Rosé.

And yet very rarely has the pink juice received much of a critical case history—a fact that is perhaps owed to its effects. As we try to pour every last glass out of what’s left of another summer, we set out to ask a few questions about it. When, and why, did the craze for rosé begin? When did it become “a thing”? How did it transcend “basic” and become a symbol of all that is good about summertime? With these deep, universe-shifting questions in mind, we went forth in hope of some answers to set the record, or at least the Wikipedia page, straight.

__First stop: the 1980s. The culprit: white zin. __

Poor white zinfandel. It sat in its box in your childhood fridge, completely unaware that it would be to blame for Americans’ repugnance towards dry rosé wine (as compared to the popular, celebratory rosé champagne, which we will ignore for this discussion, unless you want to pour us some). Grant Reynolds, the wine director at Charlie Bird, called white zin the “O.G. rosé in America.” The sweet, often blended-beyond-belief wine is now the embarrassing cousin we don’t want to admit was the very thing that got us into drinking wine in the first place. “Pink meant unsophisticated and sweet,” said Charles Bieler, the winemaker behind one of the country’s most popular rosés, Charles and Charles. “That’s a profile of white zin, which people like to piss on today—but let’s be honest—it was a gateway wine for so many Americans.”

For younger, millennial drinkers, pink wines meant mom wines. In college we drank stacks of red Solo cups of beer or two-ingredient sad excuses for cocktails. “We grew up drinking Coca-Cola,” said Patrick Cappiello, the wine director at Rebelle and Pearl and Ash, where the rosé list is now 37 rosés deep. “So our palates are attuned to that. Sweet wines are kind of entry-level wines. People say they don’t want sweet wines, but usually most of the wines that people like have a little bit of residual sugar. And then, as they start to drink more, they become O.K. with acid [and] brighter, drier, really crisp wines.”