10/26 | Natural Orange

Every day, several people walk into Wine Stop and ask for “natural orange.”

Before we say yes, we usually answer the question with another question:

Have you ever had an orange wine? Do you know what it is?

And increasingly, the answer to both questions is:

No.

That's actually good news. It gives us an opportunity to have an orange-wine talk.

From now on, we can also point people here.

Because orange wine is interesting. Very interesting. When it is perfectly constructed, clean, balanced, and made without weirdness or funk, it can be one of the most thought-provoking wines in the store.

But first we need to separate three things that have somehow become tangled together:

Orange wine. Natural wine. Georgian wine.

They are not the same thing.

Orange wine is white wine

Orange wine begins with white grapes.

Most modern white wine is made by pressing white grapes and separating the juice from the skins, seeds, and stems before fermentation. The juice then ferments largely on its own.

Orange wine changes that process.

Instead of immediately separating the juice from the grape solids, the winemaker leaves the juice in contact with the skins for days, weeks, or sometimes months. Effectively, a white grape is being treated more like a red grape.

The skins change everything.

They contribute color, tannin, phenolic compounds, texture, bitterness, aroma and flavor. The resulting wine may be pale gold, deep yellow, amber, copper, or something approaching brown.

The term “orange wine” itself is surprisingly new. British wine importer David Harvey coined it in 2004 while working in Frank Cornelissen's cellar on Mount Etna. The method, of course, is anything but new.

And despite the name, orange wine does not have to be orange.

More importantly, the color does not simply come from controlled oxidation. Skin contact extracts pigments and phenolic material from white-grape skins; oxidation can affect and deepen the color, particularly with aging, but oxidation is not what defines orange wine.

A well-made orange wine can be remarkably fresh.

Before “orange,” there was amber

Georgia has become central to the modern orange-wine story because Georgians preserved one of the world's oldest continuous traditions of fermenting wine in qvevri—large clay vessels traditionally buried underground.

White grapes such as Rkatsiteli may be fermented with their skins, seeds, and sometimes stems and left in contact with that material for an extended period.

The result is what Georgians generally call amber wine.

But here is where the modern story starts going sideways.

Qvevri wine ≠ amber wine ≠ natural wine.

Qvevri can be used for red wine as well as white. Skin-contact white wine can be made without qvevri. And neither qvevri nor skin contact automatically makes a wine “natural.”

Yet to an entire generation of Western wine drinkers, these distinctions disappeared.

Georgia became:

Georgia → qvevri → amber wine → orange wine → natural wine.

That isn't Georgian wine history.

It is modern wine marketing.

Orange wine never was “Georgian wine”

Georgia has been producing wine for roughly 8,000 years.

Georgians drank wine for all those millennia.

Most Georgian wine was not, and is not, amber wine.

Rkatsiteli is Georgia's dominant white grape. Saperavi is its dominant red. Georgian wine culture encompasses reds, whites, dry wines, sweet wines, household wines, commercial wines, qvevri wines and conventionally vinified wines.

And then there is amber wine.

One particularly interesting number puts the modern mythology into perspective.

In 2015, Georgia's National Wine Agency told NPR that qvevri wine represented less than 1% of Georgia's total wine production.

Read that again.

Less than one percent.

That number referred to qvevri wine—not specifically amber wine—so it cannot be used as an exact statistic for amber production. But it demonstrates just how small commercial qvevri production was when the Western natural-wine world was beginning to make Georgian clay vessels and amber wines famous.

Orange wine made Georgia famous to a new generation of Western wine drinkers. But orange wine was never the Georgian wine.

That distinction matters.

Was orange wine the original white wine?

Possibly—or at least something resembling it.

Imagine making wine thousands of years ago.

You harvest grapes. You crush them. Juice, skins, seeds, and perhaps stems end up together. Fermentation begins.

Separating pristine juice immediately from all the solids requires another technological step: pressing.

So it is reasonable to imagine that some of humanity's earliest white-grape wines involved substantially more skin contact than a modern Sauvignon Blanc or Riesling.

But we should be careful about calling today's orange wine an exact recreation of the world's first white wine. We don't have an 8,000-year-old cellar log telling us how many days ancient Georgian grapes remained on their skins.

What we do know is more interesting.

As winemaking became more sophisticated, winemakers learned how much extraction mattered.

By Roman times, grapes were being trodden and pressed, and different press fractions were understood to produce different qualities of wine. Later pressings were rougher and more tannic. Roman wine production could involve separating the must from the grape solids before fermentation rather than deliberately conducting the prolonged maceration we now associate with orange wine.

In other words, humanity did not abandon long skin contact because somebody forgot an ancient secret.

Winemakers learned that they didn't always want everything the skins had to give.

That may be one of the most important chapters in the history of white wine.

Remove the skins, and you can reduce tannin, bitterness, and astringency and allow other characteristics of the wine to become more prominent.

Keep the skins, and you gain something else.

Neither is inherently better.

They're different processes.

Orange wine may resemble the beginning of white winemaking. But the history of white wine is, in large part, the history of learning when to remove the skins.

Then natural wine discovered orange

Fast-forward a few thousand years.

Beginning in the late 20th century and accelerating rapidly in the 2000s, Western winemakers and wine drinkers rediscovered extended skin-contact whites. Georgian amber wine became a reference point. Producers in northeastern Italy and Slovenia helped bring prolonged maceration back into contemporary European wine culture.

Then somebody gave the broader style an easy English name:

Orange wine.

And it took off.

The natural-wine movement embraced it enthusiastically.

That made sense. Orange wine looked different. It tasted different. Its ancient techniques fit perfectly with the movement's fascination with older methods, clay vessels, spontaneous fermentations, and lower-intervention winemaking.

But somewhere along the way, a method became an identity.

And once a method becomes an identity, people start treating it as if it were a complete philosophy of wine.

Hence the customer walking into a wine shop asking for:

“Natural orange.”

Orange does not mean natural

This is an important distinction.

You can make orange wine conventionally.

You can make orange wine organically.

You can make orange wine biodynamically.

You can ferment it with cultured yeast or ambient yeast. You can add sulfur or not. You can filter it or not. You can make it in stainless steel, wood, concrete, amphora, or qvevri.

Orange describes a winemaking process involving extended contact between white-grape juice and its skins.

It tells you remarkably little about how the grapes were farmed or what else happened in the cellar.

“Natural wine” is even more complicated.

There is no universally accepted international definition matching what today's natural-wine movement means by the term. And in the United States, the legal term natural wine has a technical meaning quite different from the lifestyle category.

Federal law defines natural wine as wine produced from the juice or must of sound, ripe fruit using authorized cellar treatments. Those treatments can include practices such as acid adjustment, sweetening within prescribed limits, and other legally permitted cellar procedures. The federal definition therefore does not mean organic grapes, pesticide-free farming, native yeast, no filtration, no additives, or “nothing added, nothing taken away.”

So when somebody says:

Natural orange wine, 

we still know surprisingly little about the wine.

Funk is not a philosophy

This is where Wine Stop parts company with a portion of the natural-wine world.

We like clean wine.

That shouldn't be controversial.

A wine can be low-intervention, organically farmed, spontaneously fermented, skin-contact, amphora-aged and completely fascinating without smelling like a barnyard, vinegar, kombucha or a forgotten refrigerator.

Brettanomyces is a spoilage yeast, not an expression of terroir. Excessive volatile acidity doesn't become desirable simply because the wine was made in a garage. Mousiness isn't authenticity.

Yes, thresholds differ. Some people tolerate more Brett or volatile acidity than others. At very low levels, certain compounds can even become part of a wine's complexity.

But faults should not become proof of virtue.

We don't believe that drinking natural wine should be an endurance test.

No funk at Wine Stop.

Two hundred and twenty days

Last night we tasted a new orange wine from Portugal.

The white grapes had spent approximately 220 days on their skins.

Two hundred and twenty days.

You might expect something exhausting.

It wasn't.

The color was right. The aromas were right. The tannins were beautifully integrated. The wine was clean, sophisticated, and remarkably well constructed. Nothing funky. Nothing volatile. Nothing trying desperately to prove how natural it was.

It kept your attention.

We liked it so much that we ordered two pallets today.

That's what excellent orange wine can do.

But here's the other question:

Would I want to drink it every night with dinner?

No thanks.

And that isn't criticism.

Wine doesn't always need to demand your attention

Skin contact can bring tannin, phenolics, bitterness, texture, dried fruit, tea, herbs, spice, and savory flavors.

Those characteristics can be fascinating.

They can also become tiring when every glass demands that much attention.

Think about the idea behind something as uncomplicated as Bud Light.

Not the flavor. Not the quality. The role.

A daily beverage needs a certain amount of drinkability. It needs to be able to sit next to dinner and conversation without constantly shouting:

PAY ATTENTION TO ME.

Traditional wine culture has always understood this.

Sometimes wine is the subject of dinner.

Most of the time, wine is part of dinner.

There is a difference.

A beautiful orange wine can stop you in your tracks. That's part of its appeal.

But rarity and intensity aren't shortcomings.

They're part of what makes it special.

From method to identity

That may be the strangest part of the modern orange-wine story.

A technique that represented a relatively small and distinctive part of Georgian wine culture was rediscovered internationally and turned into something approaching an identity.

Orange stopped describing what the winemaker did and started describing what kind of wine drinker you were.

That's when things became confused.

Natural wine didn't invent orange wine.

Orange wine didn't define Georgia.

Qvevri doesn't mean orange.

Orange doesn't mean natural.

Natural doesn't mean faulty.

And ancient doesn't automatically mean better.

What orange wine gives us is another possibility.

Another tool.

Another expression of what a grape can become.

At Wine Stop, that's exactly where it belongs.

Grape. Process. Place.

Orange wine is primarily about Process.

The process can transform a familiar white grape into something completely unexpected. It can add structure, tannin, and flavors that conventional white-wine fermentation doesn't create.

Done beautifully, it deserves your attention.

But it doesn't need to replace white wine.

It expands white wine.

And perhaps that's the part of the orange-wine story worth rediscovering.

The strange thing about today's orange-wine movement isn't that people revived an ancient method. It's that they sometimes turned the exception into the rule.

Eight thousand years of wine history gave us something better than one rule.

It gave us choices.