Orange wine is not a style

The term is about twenty years old. A British importer needed a word for a set of wines he was bringing in from Friuli and Slovenia that were made from white grapes but were not white, and "orange" stuck because it described the glass.

It was a useful word. It has since become a slightly misleading one.

What it actually describes

Almost every white wine you have drunk was pressed straight off its skins. Juice out, skins away, ferment the juice. That is the standard, and it is the reason white wine is pale and direct.

Skin-contact wine simply leaves them in. The juice ferments with the skins, pips and sometimes the stems for anything from four days to eight months. What comes out is deeper in colour, tannic, and structurally much closer to a red wine than to the white it started as.

That is the whole method. There is no additional step and no shared philosophy.

Why "style" is the wrong word

A style implies a target — a set of flavours the winemaker is aiming at. Skin contact is a decision about process, and the range of things it produces is enormous.

Four days on skins gives you a white wine with a little more texture and a faintly bruised-apple note; you would not necessarily call it orange. Six months in buried clay gives you something with real tannic grip, dried apricot, tea leaf and a savoury finish that some people find difficult on the first mouthful and then order again.

Grouping those two together as one style is like grouping every wine aged in oak. It tells you what happened, not what it tastes like.

The chronology problem

The label arrived from northern Italy and Slovenia, and it arrived attached to the natural-wine movement — so in London the assumption became: orange wine is a recent, slightly countercultural thing that started in the Alps.

The method is considerably older than that and comes from further east. Fermenting white grapes on their skins in clay is the default across the regions where some of the earliest winemaking is documented, and it never went away there. What happened in Friuli in the 1990s was a rediscovery by growers who had looked at what Georgia was doing and asked why anyone had stopped.

So when a wine list files these bottles under "natural", it is filing a continuous tradition under a recent movement, and the growers who never interrupted end up looking like followers of the people who copied them.

How to order one

Two useful questions: how long on skins, and in what.

Short contact in steel is the gentle end — bring it to fish, to anything with butter, to a room-temperature table. Long contact in clay is the assertive end — bring it to grilled things, to sheep's cheese, to olive oil and dried herbs, to smoke.

If a wine list tells you only that it is orange, it has told you the colour and nothing else. Those two questions get you the rest.