The path of high-summer cocktail hour matches the ease and pace of its season: Open the refrigerator, take out a bottle, relish the cold condensation in your hand , pour, mix, drink.

Nothing embodies that spirit quite like wine cocktails, which take little more effort than remembering where you last set down the corkscrew.

Start with a kir. Served chilled and made from only two ingredients — crisp, dry white wine and crème de cassis, a black currant liqueur — a kir mixes itself directly in the glass. Its low-alcohol content is an open invitation to go the length of the sunset and drink two.

A classic wine cocktail from the Burgundy region of France, the kir gets its name from Félix Kir, a priest, World War II resistance fighter and mayor of Dijon. Legends about its origin abound. Some cry marketing ploy, theorizing that the drink was meant to give aligoté, the region’s far less famous white, a fighting chance against its chardonnay and red Burgundy. Others maintain its rise was an act of resistance: a red-hued drink in defiance of Nazi confiscation of highly prized red Burgundy during the war. Still others say the mayor simply liked the local cocktail, often serving it to visitors, some of whom brought it home to make and drink.