in 2019, orange wine finally gained official recognition from the Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET), who added content about the category to their diploma syllabus. Specific reference was also made to the Collio, and neighbouring Slovenian Brda. Students sitting the 2019 Master of Wine exams were also expected to recognise the technique, as a Georgian qvevri wine was included in the blind tasting paper, though not for the first time. Thai winemaker Nikki Lohitnavy bottled her first Elements Chenin Blanc, a skin-fermented cuvée vinified in qvevri at GranMonte winery in the Asoke valley. It brought the total number of countries where orange wine is made commercially to 35. Lohitnavy joins more than a thousand global winemakers, who produce an estimated minimum of 20m litres of orange wines a year.
Autumn 2019 was also when the New Yorker’s Troy Patterson took a wrecking ball to all things orange. Branding it a fad, he described the wines as “an assault on pleasure” and “aggressions against taste buds”. American writer and broadcaster Elizabeth Schneider published an episode of her podcast Wine for Normal People where she too stuck the proverbial boot in, describing orange wines as “a novelty” or “not very pleasurable” and ultimately suggesting that most American wine drinkers would not like them.
Is there any substance to the idea that orange wine is a transient fashion?
The rise of orange
The commercial availability of orange wines in both retail and restaurant sectors dates back two decades and shows no signs of waning, as European supermarkets and other large chains – including Asda, Aldi, Hofer, Hema and Marks & Spencer – have dipped a toe into the water. The latest sighting is an orange Grüner Veltliner produced by one of Austria’s most well-known cooperatives, Winzer Krems, for sale across branches of Dutch off-license Gall & Gall, owned by Albert Heijn, the country’s largest supermarket chain.
Interestingly, all the examples sold in supermarkets have had “orange wine” emblazoned on their labels – this is clearly the proposition, over and above country, grape variety or wine style. Yet it’s precisely this name that so often seems to get the category into trouble.
Orange wine as a term clearly occupies the same paradigm as red, white and rosé. It follows that, just like the more mainstream trinity, it should describe a winemaking technique – not a philosophy, nor a taste profile. Red wine means skin fermented red grapes; rosé is the same without the skins. White wine comes from white grapes fermented without their skins. Orange wine represents the final combination: skin-fermented white grapes.
Patterson, Schneider and others, however, tend to conflate “orange wine” and “natural wine”, under the assumption that anything orange must be, de facto, unsulphured and odd smelling. The anti-orange brigade therefore paints a picture of orange wine as invariably cloudy, tannic and sour. While there are rustic, even clumsy, examples on the market that fit this profile, the generalisation makes about as much sense as saying that all Chardonnays are heavily oaked, or that all red wines are tannic monsters.
The sheer variety of orange wines now available on the market is dizzying. Skin fermentation as a technique is versatile, after all. Just as red wines can be soft and fruity, or tannic and evolved, so orange wines span the same gamut. Winemakers such as Dane Johns of Gippsland, in Australia, Angiolino Maule in Gambellara, Italy, or Primož Lavrenčič in Vipava, Slovenia, prefer to work with light extraction and an absence of oxygen throughout the winemaking process. The end results gain subtle texture and flesh from skin contact, but not tannins or bitterness. Equally, pioneers such as Josko Gravner of Collio, Giulio Armani in Emilia-Romagna or Božidar Zorjan of Stajerška have always aimed for structured orange wines that are evolved on release and capable of evolving a good deal more in the bottle.
What drives the prejudice?
A confusion of styles
The considerable overlap between orange wine (a technique) and natural wine (a loose philosophy) is certainly a factor for commentators such as Patterson or Schneider. But winemakers don’t fit so easily into these defined categories. Gravner prefers the judicious use of sulphur during and after fermentation; his near neighbour Radikon uses none at any point. Most winemakers who are drawn to skin-fermentation will ferment with wild yeasts and no temperature control, to maximise the character extracted from the skins – but by no means all. There are plenty of orange wines on the market that have seen light filtration, despite a majority that are unfiltered.
The terminology is becoming yet more challenging due to the creative ways that winemakers use skin fermentation. Radikon, Gravner and their proteges take an ‘all or nothing’ approach, where everything undergoes very extended skin contact over multiple weeks or months, and the deeply hued, tertiary-flavoured end results are often dramatically different to anything that an unknowing consumer would recognise as a white wine. But there are many more shades of orange than this.
“We don’t treat red and white grapes differently in the vineyards, so why would we discriminate by colour in the cellar ?” says Eduard Tscheppe-Eselböck, who together with his wife Stephanie owns and runs Gut Oggau, a globally renowned biodynamic winery in Burgenland, Austria.
The Tscheppe-Eselböcks have evolved an approach where both red and white grapes see relatively short skin contact of typically 7-10 days. They don’t use the term “orange wine” either on their bottles or when describing their wines, and they don’t necessarily skin-ferment 100% of their white blends. Wines such as Timotheus or Mechthild flirt with texture and structure but retain many white wine characteristics.
Mick and Jeanine Craven, a husband and wife winemaking team based in Stellenbosch, take a similar approach with their Clairette Blanche. “We aren’t necessarily after over the top fruit driven wines,” says Mick. “Textures, acid and balance are what we want. This is why we started playing around with skin fermentation.” Their Clairette is a blend with 60% skin-fermented and 40% direct pressed juice which is then barrel-fermented. It fits easily enough into the white wine category, yet skin contact plays an important role.
It’s one of many examples where producers make decisions based on what works for the wine, rather than looking at how such a bottle would be marketed on the shelf. Niklas Peltzer, who has been the public face of Meinklang winery, a major biodynamic farm in Burgenland, Austria, for the last seven years, says “As winemakers we don’t necessarily think in boxes like ‘natural’, or ‘orange’ – we just do what feels right for the grapes we have”. Meinklang makes several wines that fit into the orange paradigm, yet none are overtly marketed as such. Peltzer explains that with aromatic varieties such as Traminer in the vineyards (the basis of the Konkret blend), skin-fermentation was an obvious choice to balance the exuberant aromatics and add all important texture.
Other issues
Categorisation really starts to break down with skin-fermented Pinot Gris, a wine that has become something of a gateway drug for both winemakers and drinkers taking their first steps with orange; Meinklang’s Graupert is a popular choice. As the pink-skinned grape lends its deep rosé hue to fermenting must in a matter of days, many such wines end up being categorised as rosé rather than orange. It raises an important question: should wine categories be based on the colour of the finished product or rather the technique that was used to make it?
Another contention, voiced by Schneider in her podcast, is that winemaking has evolved for the better. Fermenting white wines on their skins was traditional thousands of years ago, but now there’s a better way to make cleaner, fresher white wines. This is not a view shared by producers who spend a lot of time in their vineyards. Many growers, including the Gravner and Radikon families, note that throwing away the skins which can represent up to 20% of the must with thick-skinned varieties such as Ribolla Gialla, feels like madness when the whole year has been spent nurturing the vines to produce perfect grapes. John Wurdeman, who created the Pheasant’s Tears winery in Georgia to promote traditional amber and qvevri wines, goes a stage further: “If you’re just fermenting the white juice which is pressed away, it’s basically just water and fructose”.
Conceptually, the idea of removing the skin from a product to create something more refined and “pure” has some parallels in the worlds of bread, pasta and rice. Seen in context, orange wines fit into a general trend (amongst food and drink enthusiasts) where flavour and character are valued more than aesthetic appearance or angel-white complexion. The rise in popularity of sourdough or wholemeal bread is a case in point.
There are ever-greater numbers of younger winemakers now making their first forays into skin contact. They and their customers have no doubt that orange wine is neither a flash-in-the-pan nor a one trick pony.
Simon J. Woolf
This article first appeared in Issue 2, 2020 of Meininger's Wine Business International magazine, available online or in print by subscription.
