"Red Wine Supernova" is a playful and suggestive song where Chappell Roan sings of a night out and a budding attraction to another woman. She chronicles the electricity of a new connection while unapologetically enjoying every second. The title is a metaphor for the intoxicating and potentially explosive nature of this newfound attraction. "I needed a campy gay girl song that captured the magic of having feelings for another girl," Chappell Roan told Apple Music's Zane Lowe. "I packed the song with fun raunchy lyrics that make it feel like a night out flirting with the girl across the bar!"

The song took Roan three years to complete. It started as a rather melancholic ballad back in 2019. Roan was grappling with the challenge of being taken seriously as a young, queer artist. "It's a battle a lot of artists who sing about queerness struggle with too, because you're already in the territory of people not thinking that your relationships are as serious as heterosexual relationships," she confided to Billboard. "It's still really hard for me to be campy." With help from her producer Dan Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo, Conan Gray), the song blossomed into a silly and celebratory anthem, chock-full of playful innuendo. "I'm just writing from a place that feels best to me," Roan said of the end result. "It's intentional to make [my music] feel like a party, because that's what queerness feels like: It is a party."

Released on May 19, 2023, as the eighth single from Roan's debut studio album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, "Red Wine Supernova" was acclaimed by the critics. Callie Ahlgrim of Business Insider ranked it the best song of 2023. She wrote: "This is one of those perfect pop songs that, yes, ages like a fine wine. Just one sip of 'Red Wine Supernova' will heat your chest and rosy your cheeks, but the song gets better, more intoxicating, with every second that passes."