It’s time to make contact with orange wines

Like specialising in homemade pickles or having a predilection for kimchi, a taste for orange wine was once a marker of belonging to the trendy east London tribe. Now it’s breaking out of its winenerd box and going mainstream. Or, at least, it’s trying to.

Orange wine, like rosé, sits on the spectrum between red and white – but orange and rosé actually have an inverse relationship. I’m simplifying here, because there are a few winemaking choices, but rosé is made from red grapes that are vinified almost as if to make white wine: the grapes are left for a brief time after crushing before being pressed to separate the juice from the skins. Conversely, orange wine is made from white grapes that are vinified as if to make red: the juice is fermented while it is still in contact with the skins, from which it extracts colour, flavours and tannins. This results in a wine that glows amber and has increased viscosity, as well as a subtle texture and bite.

These qualities make orange wine more of a sipper than a sluicer. The tannin and other flavours that come from the skin give orange wine a presence and hold that’s great with food. At this time of year I’d pour it with roast pork, crackling and hispi cabbage with garlic and chilli, or red cabbage with apple. At any time of year, it’s great with dishes that balance multiple herbs and spices with tinges of sweetness (think maple syrup, pomegranate molasses). Yes, I’m looking at the Ottolenghi books on my shelf – it’s no coincidence that when he launched his own-label wines earlier this year, one of them was pale orange.

In Georgia, the tradition of keeping the skins (and stems) of white grapes in long contact (several months) with the fermenting wines in vessels called qvevri stretches back thousands of years. In the modern age, the practice of making such wines was, as Simon Woolf explains in his excellent book Amber Revolution: How the World Learned To Love Orange Wine, brought to light by artisan pioneers such as Božidar Zorjan in Slovenia and Joško Gravner and Paolo Vodopivec in north-east Italy.

Orange wines, particularly those that have stayed in contact with their skins for several months, can be intense and quite uncompromising. Not to everyone’s taste, or always to mine. But winemakers from all over the place have taken the techniques and played with them to create more subtle iterations.

‘I’m not the biggest fan of a lot of orange wines; I find them a bit clumsy, with some harshness,’ says David Brocklehurst, winemaker at Knightor in Cornwall. ‘But we had a small batch of muscat, very aromatic, a perfume ever so slightly like gewürztraminer. I thought OK, we’ll do skin contact but we’ll be really gentle.’ He has produced an exquisite pale apricot wine (see wines of the week) that is beautifully fragrant.

Meanwhile, commercially produced and priced orange wines from Sicily, Chile, France, Romania and Georgia itself, as well as an intriguing halforange half-rosé from the Languedocroussillon in France (also one of my wines of the week), have made their way on to high-street shelves and websites. Perhaps there’s an irony in that early orange adopters sought to move away from the mainstream, but wine is all about discovery and sharing joy.