A Beginner’s Guide to Orange Wine: Part 1

The theory bit

Sep 12, 2024

It feels like the wine media have been banging on about orange wine for ages. A small but vocal subset of Amsterdam’s Gen Z hipsters are obsessed with it. And the Georgians are up in arms about cultural appropriation (actually, I’m not sure they are – I think it’s just the wine media again). But still, multiple people – just regular, non-wine, non-hipster people – have asked me recently what orange wine actually is and what all the fuss is about. Which tells me that (despite my fear of having nothing new to say and/or other people saying it better than me) there’s still room for clarification. So here goes…

What actually is orange wine?

Remember a few weeks ago when I wrote about styles of rosé wine, and how the depth of colour is defined by the length of time the grape skins stay in contact with the juice? Well, the same principle applies here. Only we’re talking about white grapes, not black ones.

To break this down: both red and rosé wines are generally produced from black grapes (actually a very dark blue/purplish colour). Red wine is made by keeping the grape skins in contact with the juice for a long time (days, weeks or even months); rosé wine is made by keeping the grape skins in contact with the juice for a much shorter time (usually a matter of hours).

Both white wines and orange wines are made using white grapes (actually somewhere between green and pink!). But while white wines involve very little contact between the skins and the juice, orange wines are made using the red wine method: in other words, the juice stays in contact with those white grape skins for several days or weeks. And once again, the depth of colour is defined by the length of time.

There might also be other factors at play, like the colour of the grapes in the first place. Gewürztraminer grapes, pictured below, have pinkish skins to start with – which are likely to result in a deep amber-coloured wine.

Is orange wine just a fashion, here-today gone-tomorrow?

Well, that depends on how long your memory is. As we know from fashion in clothing, the same trends tend to come around again and again, after falling out of style for a while in between. The younger generation claims the trend as their own invention, while the older generation looks on knowingly and digs out the same jacket they had in the 90s (err-hm).

It’s much the same with fashions in wine, although the timelines tend to be longer. The production of orange wine dates back several thousand years to the Caucasus (now Georgia) where it’s been going on ever since. From there, it spread to Slovenia and parts of northern Italy, also centuries ago. But it was only in the 1990s that the modern revival of orange wines started to take place, and more recently still that orange wines have become fashionable in winemaking regions all over the world.

Also similar to clothing fashion, however, it takes a long time before the mainstream catches up. Just as I do not own this season’s must-haves, designed by my friends who work in fashion, I doubt that any of those same friends have a bottle of orange wine in their fridge. And when I looked for orange wine in my local Gall & Gall (a mainstream chain of wine shops in the Netherlands), they carried only two orange wines in their entire stock.

Is all orange wine natural? (Or is all natural wine orange?)

Nope, neither of the above. What makes a wine “natural” is still very badly defined, but it has nothing to do with the colour. Natural wines can be white, orange, rosé or red. It has everything to do with being low intervention: rejecting chemical fertilisers or pesticides, industrial yeasts or filtration methods.

Whereas what makes a wine “orange” is simply its contact with the grape skins. It’s totally possible to make an orange wine using conventional production methods. That said, there’s a lot of overlap.

And that’s because the same winemakers who want to innovate in one area are likely to want to innovate in another (or to go back to basics, depending on how you look at it). Equally, end consumers who are looking for something different from “conventional” wine are likely to be interested in orange wines that are also natural. Which is why (rather frustratingly, in my opinion) the two often seem to go hand in hand.

To be continued…

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I couldn’t fit everything I wanted to say about orange wines into one article without it turning into a 3,000-word essay, so I’ve decided to split it into two. Next week, I’ll be covering some general tasting notes, what food to pair with orange wines, and some good examples for you to try! If you haven’t already, please subscribe to make sure you don’t miss it 😊

On an unrelated note, I noticed that Decántalo – a website I use a lot to order wine, especially from southern Europe – is currently offering discounts of up to 15% from 10-15 September in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain and Switzerland. So if you’re thinking of ordering from Decántalo (I have recommended several wines from their site in previous Substack articles), now might be a good time.

If you have friends who are interested in orange wines – or indeed in wine website discounts – feel free to share this post with them too!