What is orange wine?

Skin contact

Orange wine is simply green grapes (white wine grapes) made like red wine. This makes sense if you know how red wine is made, but not everyone does. The major difference between white wine and red wine is skin contact. You might have heard this term before, but not fully understood it. Skin contact is the use of grape skins in winemaking. When making red wine, you gather blue grapes (also called red wine grapes), place them in a container, and press them together to extract the grape juice. Then you let them ferment with the mashed grape juice, grape skins, and sometimes even with stems. Once the grape has completed the fermentation process, everything is pressed again to separate the wine juice from the skins and stems. Finally, the wine ages before being bottled and sold.

White wine like red wine

Orange wine is made in the same way as red wine, only with green grapes instead of blue ones. Understanding what skin contact is makes it easier to grasp the differences between various wine types. Rosé wine involves making red wine like white wine (with very brief skin contact or slow pressing to extract a bit of color and flavor), and white wine is made similarly but with green grapes. In a way, we can say that orange wine is more similar to red wine than it is to white wine. But why do producers choose to have skin contact in winemaking?

The taste of the skin

As mentioned earlier, grape skins contribute color, flavor, and tannins to the wine. The duration of skin contact with the grape juice determines how much the wine extracts from the skins. The variation in the length of skin contact allows orange wine to range from light and crisp like a white wine to deep and robust like a red wine. Most orange wines have around 7-20 days of skin contact, sufficient to obtain a distinct orange color, plenty of flavor from the skins, and enough tannins for structure. The flavors from the skins also give orange wines a range of aromas, from delicate floral and herbal notes to what we call aged aromas like nuts and spices.

A long tradition

Orange wine is not a new concept; it has been made in Georgia for over 8000 years. Here, orange wine (as well as all other wines) is made in amphora, also known as qvevri. Qvevri is an oval-shaped clay jar with a pointed bottom and a round opening. These jars are buried in the ground so that only the top is exposed. When the grapes are ready to be harvested, they are pressed into the qvevri and left there with skins and stems to ferment for a few weeks to as long as 9 months. It's not coincidental that many Georgian producers choose to let the wine have 9 months of skin contact. A prevalent ideology among these producers is that their job is merely to assist the wine in creating itself. The 9 months the wine spends in the qvevri symbolize a pregnancy where the wine is born after fermentation is complete.

Natural

This ideology of being a sort of midwife to the wine and not intervening in the process is something many natural wine producers adhere to today. It's also not coincidental that almost all orange wines you find are made as natural wines. Not only has orange wine been made naturally for thousands of years, but the producers willing to experiment with making orange wine are often the same ones who have already delved into organic, biodynamic, and natural winemaking. It's a quite natural progression from making natural white wine to wanting to use the whole grape in production.

Where to start?

It can be challenging to figure out where to begin when tasting orange wine for the first time. It wasn't until recently that orange wine got its own subcategory on the Norwegian Wine Monopoly online store, and many orange wines in their selection still aren't categorized as such. Unfortunately, many establishments also lack a separate category for orange wine on their wine menus. This is because there is no official definition of orange wine in the EU. Fortunately, more people are becoming aware of what orange wine is, making it a bit easier to find.

A good place to start is with orange wines that have had between 7-10 days of skin contact, preferably from countries that produce the majority of orange wine, such as Italy, Austria, Spain, or France. If you want to taste orange wine as it has been traditionally made, there's a good selection of Georgian orange wines available.

The best advice is to just start somewhere, whether it's a glass of orange wine from your favorite wine bar or something you find at your nearest wine shop. If you're unsure if you like it, don't give up right away! There's an incredibly diverse range of orange wines with lots of delicious and exciting flavors that can surprise and delight even the most experienced wine lover.

Give orange a chance!