What is Orange Wine? A Beginner's Guide

The first thing to know about orange wine is that it is not made from oranges. This is, understandably, the first question everyone asks, and we get it more than most, given our name and the fact that we grow citrus fruit that looks like cricket balls. But orange wine is something else entirely. It is white wine made like red wine, and it has been around for approximately 8,000 years, which makes it older than almost everything else you are likely to drink.

The colour comes not from fruit but from process. When you make white wine, you press the grapes and remove the skins immediately. When you make red wine, you leave the skins in contact with the juice, which gives it colour, tannin, and structure. Orange wine uses white grapes but leaves the skins in, sometimes for days, sometimes for months. The result is a wine that is amber, copper, or golden, depending on the grape, the time, and the winemaker's patience.

An ancient method

Orange wine originated in Georgia (the country, not the American state), where winemakers have been fermenting white grapes in clay vessels called qvevri for millennia. The qvevri are buried in the ground up to their necks, filled with crushed grapes (skins, seeds, stems and all), sealed with beeswax, and left for six months. What comes out is amber, textured, and unlike anything else in the wine world.

The method spread along ancient trade routes to Italy, Slovenia, and Croatia, where it survived in pockets while the rest of the world moved on to stainless steel and temperature control. In the 1990s, a handful of Italian winemakers in Friuli began reviving the technique, and the modern orange wine movement was born.

"Orange wine is not a trend. It is a rediscovery."

What does it taste like?

This is where it gets interesting. Orange wine does not taste like white wine and it does not taste like red wine. It has the body and tannin of a light red but the acidity and aromatics of a white. Common tasting notes include dried apricot, honey, bruised apple, chamomile, and something people describe as "savoury" when they cannot think of a more specific word.

The texture is the thing. Because of the extended skin contact, orange wine has a grip that white wine lacks. It dries your mouth slightly, in the way that tea does, which makes it extraordinarily good with food. It matches things that white wine cannot handle and red wine overwhelms: hard cheese, cured meats, roasted vegetables, and anything with a bit of spice.

How to drink it

Slightly cool, not cold. If you chill an orange wine to the same temperature as a Sauvignon Blanc, you will kill the texture and most of the interesting flavours. Pull it out of the fridge twenty minutes before you plan to drink it, or keep it in a cool room rather than a cold fridge. A large glass helps, the same shape you would use for a Burgundy.

Pair it with charcuterie, with aged cheese, with grilled chicken, with a cheese board assembled by someone who takes it seriously. It is also, and this is important, the perfect wine to drink while watching cricket. It has the weight to last through a long session, the complexity to reward attention, and the colour of a late-summer evening at a county ground.

From the cellar

Our own orange wine is, at the time of writing, awaiting harvest. The grapes are in the ground. The qvevri are on order. The Cellar Mistress (that is me) has been visiting producers in Friuli and Georgia, tasting everything, and making notes that are part technical record and part love letter.

When it arrives, it will be unfiltered, skin-contact, and made with the same care we put into everything at the grove. It will be the colour of the evening light at the boundary edge. It will pair with the grower's board. And it will be, we hope, the kind of wine that makes you put your phone down and pay attention to what is in your glass.

8,000 years in the making. Worth the wait.