Orange wine has moved from a niche curiosity to a fixture on serious wine lists. Sommeliers love it, plenty of drinkers are still puzzled by it, and much of what gets written about it is muddled. Let’s set the record straight on what it is, where it comes from and why it tastes the way it does.
Orange Is a Technique, Not a Philosophy
Orange wine is white wine made like red wine. The grapes are crushed and the juice ferments with its skins, sometimes with seeds and stems too. Contact can last a few days or several months. The skins give the wine colour, from pale gold to deep amber, along with tannin and texture that a conventional white never has.
That is all the word means. It says nothing about farming or additives. Natural wine is a different idea: organic or biodynamic grapes, wild yeast, and little or nothing added in the cellar. The two overlap often, because many skin-contact producers also work with minimal intervention. But an orange wine can be made with cultured yeast and sulphites, and a natural wine can be a perfectly clear white. Treat them as separate questions.
Eight Thousand Years in Clay
Skin contact is not new. It is the original way to make wine. In 2017, researchers led by Patrick McGovern found wine residues in pottery jars from two Neolithic villages in Georgia, Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, dated to roughly 6000 to 5000 BC. That makes Georgia the oldest known winemaking culture on earth.
Georgian winemakers have fermented white grapes on their skins in buried clay vessels called qvevri ever since. In 2013, UNESCO added the method to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Georgians call the result amber wine, and the vessel deserves a story of its own: see our companion piece, Qvevri Winemaking Technique: The Ancient Art of Wine Fermentation.
The Modern Revival
For most of the twentieth century, Western winemaking went the other way: fast pressing, clean juice and temperature-controlled steel. Skin-contact whites survived in Georgia and in pockets of rural Europe, and little else.
The revival started on the border between Italy and Slovenia. In Friuli’s Collio and Oslavia, producers such as Joško Gravner and Stanko Radikon turned back to long maceration around the turn of the millennium, Gravner eventually adopting Georgian clay vessels. Their wines were divisive, and they were impossible to ignore.
The category still needed a name. In 2004, David Harvey of the British importer Raeburn Fine Wines coined “orange wine”, and the label stuck. Today it is made from Australia to Oregon, in clay, oak, concrete and steel.
How It’s Made
The key decision is time on skins. A few days give a light, gently textured wine with a hint of colour. Weeks or months give deep amber, firm tannin and a savoury, almost umami depth.
The vessel matters too. Qvevri and amphorae add earthiness and texture, old oak gives breadth, and steel keeps the fruit precise. Grape variety shapes the rest. Aromatic varieties like Muscat or Gewürztraminer go floral and exotic, while neutral grapes like Ribolla Gialla or Rkatsiteli go nutty, tea-like and structured.
In the Glass and at the Table
Expect apricot and dried orange peel, bruised apple, black tea, nuts, honey and dried herbs. There is often a light oxidative edge, and always that grip of tannin on the finish.
That tannin is what makes orange wine so useful at the table. It handles food that defeats most whites: spiced and fermented dishes, Middle Eastern and Georgian cooking, mushrooms, aged hard cheeses and roast pork or poultry. Serve it cool rather than cold, around 12 to 14°C, and give it air.
Final Sip
Orange wine is not a trend. It is the oldest way to make white wine, rediscovered by a few stubborn producers and given a name only twenty years ago. Judge it the way you judge any wine: by balance, by precision and by whether it makes you want a second glass. Just don’t call it natural unless the producer has earned the word.
Cheers!