Is wine's future orange?

Orange wine has moved from boutique curiosity to wine-bar favourite. Is it part of the mainstream now? Plus: what I've been drinking this week

Apples and oranges: clockwise from top left, Canadian sommelier Emma Twidale enjoys a Georgian natural orange-rosé, Tbilisi, Georgia; tasting orange wines at Cellar Door Wines, St Albans; Mamuka Makhoshvili at Kardanakhi 1888 explains qvevri technology, Kakheti, Georgia; his qvevri room (the qvevri are below the brick circles)

For the closest thing that wine has to a guerilla movement, it was a strangely mainstream moment. Earlier this year, supermarket chain Aldi unveiled its first own-brand orange wine, Specially Selected Rosorange Rosé. Considering that less than a decade ago, orange wines were defiantly in the “natural” wine camp – low-intervention, artisan wines – and definitely not in budget supermarkets, it’s quite a moment of domestication, like hearing thrash metal rendered as elevator music for the first time.

So is orange wine really mainstream now? Natural wine specialist Simon Woolf is the leading British authority and author of Amber Wine: How the World Learned to Love Orange Wine; he cautions that even today, “I'd guess that 75 per cent of the world's wine drinkers have never heard of orange wine or tasted one.” Nevertheless, all of the major supermarket chains now carry them, while my local small wine shop has at least half a dozen to choose from. And there’s at least one on the list of many London wine bars these days.

Penny Edwards, manager and co-owner of independent Cellar Door Wines in St Albans, Hertfordshire, says that “Gen Z are asking for pét nat, natural and orange wine and enjoy learning about it.” She stocks 15 orange wines now compared to two just a few years ago. She adds, “millennials tend to ask about orange wine because they’ve heard about it or read about it, but they’re not necessarily buying it on a regular basis like younger people.”

As Edwards hints, there is a strong overlap between orange and natural wines, made with low intervention in the winery and especially with low levels of added sulphur dioxide, the most common preservative used in winemaking. Orange wines are also more often “pét-nat” than most – pétillant naturel, a gently sparkling style where the wine is bottled before it has finished fermenting. This gives a less fizzy (or pressurised) style than champagne or other traditional-method sparklers; they’re often unfiltered and cloudy too. Pét-nats are proudly un-serious wines – which is no doubt part of their appeal. And the same is true of (still) orange wines: whereas the whole topic of natural wines can be freighted with winemaking ideology and geekery, as I described last year, orange wines present themselves as just fun.

Their origin is characteristically offbeat. Orange wine originated in Georgia, which generally claims for itself the title of Cradle of Wine, having made it for around 8,000 years, wine soon after the invention of farming itself. The signature Georgian winemaking technique uses “qvevri”, large, earthenware amphorae that are buried up to their necks in the ground. For both red and white wines, the grape juice is fermented on the skins and left macerating over the winter. That length of maceration for red grapes is highly unusual in western Europe, though all red wines have a period of maceration on the grape skins, albeit usually less than a month, in say stainless steel or concrete tanks.

It’s the treatment of white grapes as though they were red that is radically different. Normally, a winemaker separates the skins and seeds of white grapes from the juice before the fermentation starts. Leaving the “must” on the skins to macerate – “skin contact” of anywhere from a few hours to a year – means that it acquires a deeper, orangey colour, and the wine gets more tannins and grip from the skins and pips too.

White wine was rarely made like this outside of Georgia until the 1990s. There had been an old local tradition in Friuli, in what is now the far north-eastern corner of Italy, on the Slovenian border, of giving the local white Ribola Gialla grapes some skin contact to give the wine more flavour and body. It appears to have died out in the early twentieth century. But in 1995, the late Stanislao “Stanko” Radikon, an Italian winemaker in Friuli, experimented by leaving his white grapes on their skins for a week.

The following year in the same area, Joško Gravner had lost 95 per cent of his crop, thanks to hailstorms. He had been a conventional winemaker since the 1970s but had already become disillusioned with technical modern winemaking. So he didn’t release a1995 vintage but instead experimented with various vinifications of what little Ribolla Gialla juice that he had. He came to the same conclusions as Radikon, in 1997 releasing what is generally recognised as the first modern “orange” wine – though Gravner has always preferred the term “amber”.

Then in 2000, Gravner visited Georgia and came back a convert to qvevri. He has since imported dozens of the distinctive amphorae from the Caucasus. Both he and Radikon also began experimenting with long ageing and by reducing the amount of sulphur dioxide added to their wines – the “natural” technique pioneered by some French winemakers in the 1980s. The result was not only a new colour of wine but also a big boost for the nascent natural wine movement. As Simon Woolf says, “orange wine is a category that never existed in the mainstream wine world, so it represents the biggest point of difference from ‘conventional’ wines. So it became the poster child for all natural wine.”

It has, however, become a more mainstream idea over the past 20 years, especially in area straddling the Italian-Slovenian frontier, and in other places in the western Balkans, such as Croatia. In December last year, the Collio Denominazione authorised an official new orange category, for white wines with at least seven days’ skin contact. In February this year, Woolf published on his Substack blog a guide to no fewer than 44 such wines from Collio; today he publishes a guide to the orange wines of the Slovenian region over the border, Brda. The Slovenians use the same Ribolla Gialla grapes as in Italy, though here the variety is known as Rebula.

There are now orange wines being made all over Italy. There’s also a small but fast-growing band of orange-wine makers in Greece: as Julia Harding MW reported for JancisRobinson.com last week, two of the top wines in this year’s Great Greek Wines competition were orange, both from the Peloponnese. And of course in France, stronghold of the natural wine crusade, trademark wacky orange-wine labels are becoming a staple of hip wine bars and independent merchants.

So what are they like? I tend to feel similarly about non-Georgian orange wines as I do about natural wines in general: some are brilliantly original, a few are criminally faulty, and there are a load in the middle which range from pleasant to slightly odd. They tend to be a bit short: they have tannin and grip that straight whites don’t, but often without the depth to quite carry it off. On the other hand, because of their tannin and acidity, they can be particularly food friendly – while remaining fresh, even in the case of Georgian amber wines, which tend to be bigger. The marmaladey, tangerine and apricot fruit notes of some can be gorgeous (and I don’t even like marmalade.)

And in the hands of a winemaker like Gravner, these can be very serious wines. At this week’s Central and East European winetasting in London, I loved Matjaž Četrtič’s Ferdinand Winery Brutus Rebula 2020, from the Slovenian Brda, with a whole year on its skins yet still crisp, fresh and beautifully balanced; and Serbian Vinčić Winery’s Amfora 2019, complex and long. Both are sadly as yet unavailable in the UK. I think I can feel a trip to Slovenia coming on: a new frontier for me, in more ways than one.

Five orange wines to try

Catarratto Maremosso 2022, Sicily – Cateratto is Sicily’s most widely planted grape, though very little of it is made into wine like this. It’s had several weeks of skin contact orange: unfiltered and thus slightly cloudy, though it’s not aggressively “natural” in style. Crisp, fresh, grapefuit/marmalade notes and good acidity (Edith Wharton Wines, Buon Vino, Quaff, Mother Superior and elsewhere, from £17. Bedales wine bar in London’s Borough Market have it by the glass.)

Lyrarakis Orange Wine 2024, Crete – this wine from excellent Cretan producer Lyrarakis is a 50/50 blend of local grape Vidiano and and the more celebrated Greek white variety Assyrtiko. It’s had a week on its skins but isn’t particularly “natural” in style: marmaladey, citrus nose and decent acidity. A food-friendly wine (Majestic, £13, or £12.50 as part of any six-bottle purchase.)

Shilda Winery “Rustaveli” Qvevri 2022, Kakheti – this Georgian amber wine has an inviting, orange-marmaladey nose; well balanced, spicy notes, more length than some (Quaff, £19.99. George Nordahl sells it by the glass at his pop-up wine bar in Walthamstow.)

Tre Monti Albana Orange 2020, IGP Rubicone Bianco – this wine from the northern Italian region of Emilia Romana is made one of the local white grapes, typically almost unknown outside its provincial home. There are seven grammes of residual sugar though you hardly notice it with the bracing acidity: peachy fruit, fresh and clean (Sustainable Wine Solutions, Walthamstow, pick up £15/50cl and by the glass in weekend taproom; Dexter and Jones, £17.50.)

Tbilvino “Qvevris” Kisi 2022, Kakheti – Tbilvino is a big, forward-looking Georgian winemaker built out of the ruins of the Soviet-era industry and their wines are reliably good. The new vintage of this wine, made with local white grape Kisi, has four months on its skins in qvevri: tangerine fruit, spicy, dry yet fresh, well balanced (Abingdon Fine Wine, £28.)

Curious orange: Joško Gravner, the father of modern orange wine, Collio, Italy

What I’ve been drinking this week

Adega Pedralonga “Do Umia” Tinto 2022, Rías Baixas – Spanish wine nerds like me tend to think of red grape Mencía as coming from Bierzo and Ribeira Sacra, in north-west Spain. But it is grown in neighbouring Rías Baixas too, better known for Albariño - especially the Albariño heartlands of the Val do Salnés sub-zone, where this wine comes from. This Mencia-dominant blend – local red grapes Caíño Tinto and Espadeiro are in there too - is characteristically fresh, with lots of acidity and some minerality. And it’s just 12.5 per cent alcohol (Vining Street Wine Club, Vino Vero, from £19.95.)

Anatolikos “Fine” Mavroudi 2022, PGI Avdera – an unusual red grape from an unusual region of Greek, Thrace, way up in the north east. From organically grown grapes, this is ripe, spicy, earthy, with satisfyingly chewy tannins and well-integrated oak. Pretty serious – which it should be, at this price… (Maltby and Greek, £35.)

Proprietà Sperino “Uvaggio” 2021, Coste della Sesia Rosso – I loved the Nebbiolo-dominated wines from this producer in the Alto Piemonte, in the far north east of the region, at importer Liberty’s tasting this week. None of them are cheap, but they’re all wonderfully elegant and mineral expressions of the grape, to me more so than most Barolos – including this one, nicely supple and earthy (the 2021 doesn’t appear to be in the UK yet but Focus Wines, Bat and Bottle, London End Wines and others have the 2017/2020, from £27.)