Permit me, for a moment, to complain about the weather. I have a point (promise), and it involves Martha Stewart.

There’s a particular anguish to early March in New York. The city’s inhabitants have arrived on the other side of February more mole than human, cursing the gelid pall of the place and vowing to move back to Tucson for real this time. March arrives and it’s . . . still bitter. So, so bitter. Weather doesn’t hew faithfully to the Gregorian calendar, but by March, it feels like the city has earned spring. Any minute now the parks will defrost, trees will flower, baristas will chirp, “No, we don’t have iced coffee, but I can put some ice in our breakfast blend,” and rosé season—that blessed time of year—will begin in earnest. But not yet. There’s something called “thunder snow” to face first.

The only thing that could turn these fledging days of March more torturous is a walk to the Javits Center. And the only thing that could make trundling up to the climate-controlled bird cage in Midtown West worth it is one woman: Martha Stewart. I know this because I happily walked those blocks to meet the lifestyle luminary who needs no introduction on a Monday afternoon in March. She sat in a conference room on the floor above the New York Wine Expo, where a handful of the vintners whose wares are available through her year-old delivery service, Martha Stewart Wine Co., were serving samples. Her assistant poured two glasses of Les Muraires Coup de Rosé, a grenache blend. They sat untouched like Chekhov’s gun between us. We were there to talk wine, and specifically rosé, because the season? I’m told it’s already here.

“Rosé is like white shoes after Labor Day,” she told me at the beginning of our conversation, with a firm nod. “You can wear white shoes anytime now.”

Rosé has no season! You can drink rosé anytime. “We do it in our family, drink it all year round,” she said. “We’re pretty much white and rosé.” Adjust the chalkboard bar signs accordingly: rosé all day, every day, come wintry mix, come polar vortex, come seasonal affective disorder. Rosé is a season of the mind, and with a will and a way and $10-$20, one can placate one’s summer palate even in those desperate final days of winter.

I should have known. The arc of Martha Stewart’s career predicted this particular moment. She’s said all along that you, too, can have fine things—preposterously fine things—like an expertly iced cake, a healthy rose garden, something delicious to pair with fish and a nice lentil salad, and you don’t have to wait. You can have them now. Right now. In this conference room in the Javits Center.

By Martha’s convincing logic, rosés are relatively foolproof, not “considered so serious, considered very drinkable. Very refreshing, very pleasant . . . Rosés are easier because there’s so many delicious rosés and then some real clunkers. And I don’t think it takes as much thought to find a delicious rosé as it does to find the perfect cabernet sauvignon, for example. That’s much harder to choose. You know when you find the rosé that you like, especially.”

On the east side of the Hamptons, the place Stewart has called home for more than 25 years, rosé has conquered the summer months as effectively as those giant pool floats shaped like aquatic birds. Has she ever heard it called “Hamptons tap water,” I wondered aloud, having heard as much from a friend of a friend who summers there. “No, but that’s probably pretty accurate. Especially—well, we don’t drink the tap water in East Hampton.” We drink rosé.

Rosé began showing up in the Hamptons about a decade ago, and since then, it “certainly has become the drink of choice.” (Never forget the great rosé drought of 2014.) “And many people are putting ice in it, drinking it sort of like iced tea. And they start at lunch and go all the way through the rest of the day.” Yes, the South has its ice tea, perhaps, but the Hamptons has something better. Liquid rose gold on ice.

I asked her to walk me through a wine tasting, so I could get a sense of how she chooses wine for others to enjoy. We turned to those two glasses before us, filled with a hue that, no matter what season it is, will forever conjure up images of beaches and picnics and other things that are easy and nice.

She asked, “What does it smell like to you?” Wine, mostly, I thought. It smells like wine. What I actually said wasn’t much more informed. “Minerals? I’m getting some minerally-ness.”

Stewart, too polite or too professional to tell me I was incorrect, or worse, uncouth, continued unfazed. “I don’t think mineral is so much associated with rosé as—. Well, take a sip.” We sipped. “I don’t usually associate wines with as many fruits and vegetables and other flavors as so many professional wine tasters. I sort of know what I like, what’s drinkable, what’s pleasant on the tongue, what’s pleasant going down your throat, what makes you happy.”

“This wine tastes very good to me,” Stewart proclaimed. This wine makes me very happy, I thought. It tastes like summer. New kinds of wine—a pét-nat, perhaps, or something orange—might have started trust busting rosé’s monopoly on trendiness, but nothing quite triggers that Pavlovian response like the pink stuff.

And before I knew it, we were in St. Barts. “When I first discovered rosé, it was in St. Barts and we drank the beautiful [Domaines] Ott*,” she says. I thought I caught a faraway glint in her eye, but maybe she just tilted slightly upward to the overhead lighting. “And very expensive, you know. At Taïwana [where Stewart would stay], it was $160 a bottle and we go through four bottles at lunch and it was like the wild thing and everybody fell in love with rosé.”

To be sure, the wines sold through Martha Stewart Wine Co. are more affordable, but shhhh, not now, we’re in Stewart’s memory. “Oh, it was just, it’s so pleasant. You’re sitting in the sun with, maybe, hopefully, a big sun hat on, you’re sipping something so light and refreshing and tasty and icy cold.”

I woke from this warm daydream because it was time to step back out into a bad forecast. She thanked me for my time and I thanked her for hers. “Back to St. Barts we should go,” she signed off.

Martha, I’m already there.