LOS ANGELES — Wine merchant Randy Kemner is tickled pink about rose.

Sales of blush vintages at his Wine Country store in Signal Hill are running 43 percent ahead of last year.

Thanks go to customers such as Tom Reep, 52, of Long Beach, who are starting to buy dry rose after tiring of longtime summer standby chardonnay.

"We were looking for something to drink outside on our patio or when we had something on the grill," said the retired information technology executive as he bought a bottle of Chateau Martinette rose from France for $12.99. "Rose is so food friendly, it goes with everything."

Rose wine is typically made from red grapes.

Nina Flores, 26, said her first taste of wine was of a pink — the sweeter and ubiquitous white zinfandel that seemingly every California winery makes.

"Now I like to drink a dry rose, but only in summer. It is lighter, fruitier and great for the afternoons or picnics," Flores said. .

Flores and Reep reflect a national trend, said Brian Lechner of market research company Nielsen Co. Factoring out white zinfandel, which by volume is about 9 percent of the table wine market, he said, sales of rose wines priced at $6.50 or more have become one of the hottest segments in all table and sparkling wine categories, rising by about 39 percent nationally in the first half of this year compared with a year earlier.

Still, rose wines make up less than 1 percent of the $28 billion in wine that Americans buy annually. Chardonnay remains the best seller, followed by merlot and cabernet sauvignon. Although white zinfandel is still popular, its sales are starting to slip, according to Nielsen.

"Today's wine drinkers are more adventurous," Lechner said.

The Nielsen numbers, which follow sales only in major grocery, drug and liquor chains, probably understate the trend, he said. "We don't track chains like Trader Joe's and Whole Foods that do a better job with roses than the average supermarket or drugstore."

"In the 1970s, a gourmet dinner took place at a French continental restaurant with a lot of butter-based recipes," Kemner said. "Now we have a more Mediterranean diet where we have turned to olive oil, garlic and fresh herbs. That all goes with rose — so our wine palate is catching up with our food palate."

When Kemner first held a tasting of rose wines in 1996, only 13 people showed up. In June, he sold 131 tickets at $15 each to his annual tasting of blush wines.

Most of what Kemner sells is imported, primarily from France and Spain. American winemakers, he said, have been slow to catch on to the trend.

Steve Edmunds, whose Edmunds St. John winery in Berkeley makes one from gamay noir grapes grown high in the Sierra foothills, notes:

"The market became conditioned against rose in the 1970s because it was so poorly made," he said, "and it has taken a long time for perceptions to change."

When California winemakers turned to dry rose in recent years, they were tripped up by a propensity to have too high an alcohol content compared with European versions of the wines, Edmunds said.

High alcohol gives the wine a hot feel and deadens the fruit.

The grapes for Edmunds' rose are grown at an altitude of about 3,400 feet.

"That allows the grapes to ripen at a lower sugar level and creates a wine with lower alcohol," Edmunds said.