The short version#
Orange wine is white wine made the way red wine is made. Instead of pressing the grapes and fermenting clear juice, the winemaker leaves the juice with the skins, usually the seeds, sometimes the stems, for anywhere from a few days to many months. The skins give colour, tannin and a different set of aromas. That is the whole trick. Everything else people say about it, good and bad, follows from that one decision.
I have poured it in Friuli, where the hills around Oslavia in north-east Italy made it famous; in Georgia, where Kakheti has been doing it for centuries and calls it amber; and at my own table in Brno. This article is about the technique, not the movement. The two overlap, but they are not the same thing, and confusing them causes most of the arguments.
Four colours, one grape decision#
Think of it as a grid. Red grapes fermented on their skins give red wine. Red grapes pressed off quickly give rosé. White grapes pressed straight away give white wine. White grapes fermented on their skins give orange wine. That fourth square sat nearly empty in western Europe for most of the twentieth century, which is why it looks like a novelty. It is in fact the older method; pressing clean juice before fermentation needs equipment and hygiene that village cellars did not have.
The colour comes from phenolic compounds in the skins, the same family that makes a red wine red. White grapes carry far less pigment, so the result is gold, apricot, copper or deep amber rather than purple, and the shade depends on the grape, the length of contact and how much air the wine has seen. The name is a rough one. Georgians prefer amber wine, and after a glass of six-month Rkatsiteli you see why. The English term is usually credited to the British importer David Harvey around 2004; it stuck because it is short.
What the skins actually do#
Three things change when the skins stay in.
Tannin. Seeds and skins release tannin during fermentation, so orange wine has grip. A long-macerated Ribolla Gialla can dry the gums like a young Nebbiolo. This is the part that surprises people who expect white wine with a twist. It behaves like a light red and it wants food.
Aroma. The fresh primary fruit of a pressed white, the pear, citrus and blossom, gives way to dried apricot, orange peel, black tea, walnut, honey and camomile. Some of this is extraction from the skins; some is the slow, controlled oxidation that long fermentations in open vats or clay encourage. A bruised-apple note can be a fault or a style, and telling which is the sommelier’s job.
Stability. Phenolic compounds are antioxidants, and tannin protects a wine the way it protects a Barolo. This is why many skin-contact producers feel able to work with little or no added sulfur and long ageing in old wood: the skins have done part of the preservative’s job. It is not magic, and it is not a licence for careless cellar work, but it is real chemistry.
Two traditions: Kakheti and Oslavia#
Georgia never stopped. In Kakheti, the eastern province that grows most of the country’s grapes, the traditional method puts Rkatsiteli, Kisi or Mtsvane into a buried qvevri with all of its skins and often its stems, and leaves it there through the winter, about six months. The earth keeps the temperature steady, the pointed base lets the solids settle away from the wine, and what comes out is amber, tannic and built for a table of walnut sauces and khachapuri. UNESCO listed the qvevri method as intangible heritage in 2013. West of the Likhi range, in Imereti, growers return only a fraction of the skins, from a fifth to a half and without stems, for a few weeks to two months, and the wines come out paler and lighter. Same idea, a different setting on the dial.
The Italian side is younger and more deliberate. Oslavia is a hamlet above Gorizia in Friuli’s Collio, on a crumbling marl and sandstone the locals call ponca, with the Slovenian border a few hundred metres away. In 1995 Stanko Radikon went back to fermenting his Ribolla Gialla on the skins the way his grandfather had: a week at first, later months, in open Slavonian oak vats. In 2000 his neighbour Joško Gravner travelled to Georgia, and in 2001 he buried his first qvevri and fermented part of that year’s Ribolla in them, about three months on the skins. Today the estate’s rule is six months on the skins in qvevri, six more off them, six years in large botti and six months in bottle, the wine released around seven years after the harvest. In 2008 six Oslavia growers, Radikon among them, formed an association to define a macerated Ribolla of Oslavia. Ribolla is the right grape for it: thick-skinned, fairly neutral when pressed early, and capable of turning deep amber and structured after a season in contact.
I write about both cellars in their own stories, Gravner and Radikon, because a Radikon Ribolla and a Gravner Ribolla from the same hill and the same grape taste unmistakably different. Vessel, length of contact, years in wood and even the bottle (Radikon uses 500 ml and one-litre bottles with a slim cork so the wine ages like a magnum) all pull in different directions. That is the argument against treating orange as one category.
What orange wine is not#
It is not a synonym for natural wine. Skin contact is a technique; natural wine is a set of farming and cellar choices. Many of the best-known orange wines come from low-intervention growers, but a large winery can macerate white grapes in temperature-controlled steel, inoculate with cultured yeast, filter, add sulfur and bottle a perfectly clean orange wine. Several do. Plenty of natural wine, in turn, is white and pressed off the skins the normal way. If you want the natural argument, I have written it up separately in what natural wine actually is and in the piece on sulfites.
It is not necessarily cloudy. Haze comes from skipping fining and filtration, which is a separate decision. Gravner’s Ribolla is unfiltered, and years of settling in large botti leave it clear in the glass.
It is not automatically funky. Volatile acidity that stings the nose, a mousy aftertaste that arrives a few seconds after you swallow, vinegar: these are faults in an orange wine exactly as they are in a Chablis. Long skin contact does not excuse them. When I pour a wine that is oxidative on purpose, I say so.
It is not new. What is new is the international market for it, which is roughly two decades old.
How to drink it#
Serve it cooler than a red and warmer than a white. Between 12 and 16 °C the fruit and the tannin both show without either taking over; Radikon’s own advice has long been 14 to 16 °C, shared from big bottles at table. Straight from the fridge an amber Rkatsiteli tastes of nothing but grip.
Give it a wide glass and time. Many of these wines change more in the first hour than a pressed white will in an evening.
Eat with it. Tannin needs fat, salt or protein. In Kakheti that means khachapuri, pkhali and anything with walnuts; in the Collio it means frico, the Montasio and potato cake, San Daniele ham and roast pork. At home in Brno it means a plate of aged cheese or a roast chicken with the skin crisp. Orange wine with delicate raw fish is a mistake I have watched people make at tastings: the tannin flattens the fish and the fish makes the wine taste bitter.
What I pour#
I pour both. On a Georgian evening in Sighnaghi I will put a six-month Kisi from Pheasant’s Tears next to a Rkatsiteli from a large classic house’s qvevri line, both amber, one made with wild yeast and no filtration, the other with careful cellar hygiene and a measured dose of sulfur. Both are honest wines. The point of tasting them together is to feel what the skins gave and what the cellar philosophy added on top.
In Friuli the comparison runs the other way: an Oslavia Ribolla with months of contact against a Collio Friulano pressed clean the same week, from vines a few kilometres apart. After that, nobody in the group calls orange wine a fashion.
On tour#
The Friuli and Collio tour is built around this article: Oslavia cellars, a Carso afternoon with Vitovska, and long tastings drawn from the botte. The Kakheti qvevri tour does the same for the Georgian method, ideally in October when the qvevri are being filled. If you would rather begin closer to home, a day in the Moravian cellars will find you skin-contact Pálava within an hour of Brno, and I am happy to build a private route around it.
