“They’re wines that tend to showcase texture rather than fruit,” says Jared Hooper, LA-based writer turned sommelier. That tactile aspect turns some people off. “They’re amazing wines to use as a bridge between different elements on the plate.” Larkins says these wines work well with caramelized onions, nuts, cheeses and game birds, thanks to their richness in texture. “Orange wines are great to use in pairings,” says Emily Larkins, wine director at Craigie on Main restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts. We’re now starting to do a fraction of it with carbonic maceration, and that tends to bring out more cinnamon and nutmeg notes.”Īs a genre, orange wines tend to have dried-fruit notes like apricot and peach, as well as a lot of nuttiness and caramel aromas.
“The ’11 and ’12 vintages have hints of baking-spice aromatics. “The ’09 had a lot of lees in it, and it smelled like pumpkins,” Rinke says. Their trials have resulted in very different types of orange vintages. “We make a Pinot Gris, so I suggested trying to do a little something different with it.” “We kind of fell in love with them, and we were taken by their uniqueness,” Rinke says. In the Willamette Valley of Oregon, Johan Vineyards winemaker Dan Rinke and winery owner Dag Sundby spent the spring of 2007 tasting Italian orange wines like Gravner and Radikon. He even makes an orange-style wine from a grey grape called Trousseau Gris-it looks like a rosé but tastes like an orange wine. Allen himself made orange wine from a blend of Roussanne and Marsanne grapes in 2011. “People making orange wines, by their nature, are more experimental,” says William Allen, winemaker and owner of Sonoma County’s Two Shepherds winery. He returned with some qvevris and made Georgian-style orange wines using Friuli grapes, thus drawing more attention worldwide to orange wines.īesides Italy and Georgia, Slovenia and Croatia also make orange wines, and over the last five years, adventurous winemakers in the United States have gotten in on the action. While they’ve always been the wine of choice within Georgia, this method of winemaking didn’t attract much interest elsewhere until Italian winemaker Josko Gravner visited Georgia in the early 1990s. “But people who are looking for something new are really surprised by orange wines.” “This is the oldest way of making wine,” Bell says.
#Orange wine skin#
The colour varies with the type of grapes used (Pinot Gris, Rkatsiteli and Grenache Blanc, to name a few), the length of time spent in skin fermentation, and the method of aging, says Jessica Bell, a certified sommelier and wine educator who has consulted for Georgian wineries.
The unusual aging process, which extracts phenols, tannins and antioxidants, produces orange-tinged hues that range from golden honey to deep amber. The exception: Qvevris are still used to make orange wines. Over time, as viniculture spread, qvevris were replaced with barrels, which gave way to stainless steel tanks. These vessels were lined with molten beeswax and buried in the ground to stabilize temperatures. Referred to as the original winemakers, Georgians have used citron-shaped clay vessels, called qvevri, to make wine since 6000 BC. Georgia is considered the birthplace of orange wine. “So they can be compared to both white and red wines, but they are their own genre.” “Orange wines have the freshness of whites with the structure of reds,” says John Wurdeman, owner of Pheasant’s Tears winery, which has vineyards in the Kakheti and Kartli regions of the country of Georgia. But unlike red wines, which are fermented for a period of 10 days to one month, orange wines can be fermented from two weeks to seven months. Orange wines are white wines that are skin-fermented like reds.
Fundamentally, their classification derives not from the type of grape used but from the winemaking process. The definition of orange wines has been debated frequently at forums like this year’s RAW wine fair in London.
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