(NHRegister) - Name all the colors of wine, and you'll start with the obvious ones: red, white and pink, or rosé. Maybe you know about orange wine, or vinho verde - "green wine" from Portugal that's technically a white, but we'll let it slide. There's even blue wine (we taste-tested it; it was mostly gross).

It's time to add another color to your wine rainbow: Black.

First things first: Black wine isn't black because of food coloring or some sort of food science trickery. Blue wine, for example, gets its blue color from anthocyanin, a pigment found in grape skins, and indigotine, a dye extracted from plants. But black wine is just very dark red wine. When you pour it, its legs - the streaks that appear on the inside of the glass - will appear red, but if you put your hand under the glass and look down, it will appear inky and completely opaque. Black wines vary in flavor profiles - we sampled a few that ranged from lighter to full-bodied and tart to sugary-sweet - but a common element seems to be the flavor of blackberry.

There are professional wine writers who can opine at length about black wine and its centuries-long history - how it comes from malbec or saperavi grapes, how it hails from France or the country of Georgia, how it has a bold flavor that can "stand up to rich and hearty fare such as foie gras, black truffles, beef, game meats, duck confit and cassoulet," wrote Michael Austin in the Chicago Tribune. But what we're here to talk about is how the color black - or nearly black, in this case - is gaining ground in the food world.