What is orange wine? SPOILER: It's not made from oranges.
Orange wine is technically a style of white wine made from white grapes (not oranges) and their skins. The nomenclature “orange wine” is derived from the wine’s seemingly peculiar color in the glass and not the fruit from which it’s fermented. Other pseudonyms include “amber wine,” “copper wine,” and “skin-contact wine” — the latter being somewhat indicative of the process by which it’s made. To understand orange wine and its significance, it’s important to first understand the three other better-circulated styles: white, red, and rosé.
A fairly typical color for an orange wine.
This particular one is from Georgia — please ignore the doritos in the background of the photo 😅.
What is white wine?
There are two broad families of wine grapes: red and white. There are also two important components of a grape with regard to winemaking: the flesh/juice and the skins. White wines are wines made from white grapes using only the flesh/juice; no skins. Of course, no grapes are actually white. White means anything from gray-ish to pink-ish to orange-ish to yellow-ish. Without the skins, the resulting wine is the color we’re used to seeing when we think of white wine. Less popular but also possible is making white wine using red grapes, again without any skin contact, in a style known as blanc de noirs (translation: white from blacks). This is possible because the flesh of grapes, whether white or red, is almost always near-colorless. Think about the flesh of a red table-grape if you bite halfway into it… it’s not red at all. It’s more gray-ish and colorless. The color for red wine then (and indeed, rosé and orange wine) comes from the skins.
What is red wine?
It follows somewhat naturally, then, that red wine is made from red grapes using both flesh/juice and skins. Within the skins of grapes reside two important compounds: tannins and anthocyanins. Tannins taste bitter and make your mouth go dry; anthocyanins are the color pigment that saturate wines with color. Because white wine has no skin contact, it by definition has neither tannins nor anthocyanins. Because red wine does have skin contact, it has both.
What is rosé?
Rosé can be made via several different methods, but, in short, it is a hybrid between blanc de noirs and red wine. Rosés are made from red grapes and with very minimal skin contact — think several hours instead of days — just enough to dye the wine pink and impart modest flavor. It’s why most rosés tend to taste much more similar to white wine than to red because the duration of skin contact in rosé is closer to that of white wine (i.e. none at all) than it is to a typical red wine.
Orange wine atop a table of typical Georgian accompaniments.
For more on Iago’s wine (on the table), see our award-nominated documentary In Pursuit of Flavor, included with the unPINNED course.
What is orange wine?
Orange wine is white wine made with skin contact, unlike the white wines we’re used to, which have no skin contact. The origins of wine are, in fact, skin contact wines, orange wines — from Georgia the country. To remove the skins from wine is an unnecessary, added step to the original process of winemaking, which required simply to put grapes in a pot and wait for it to become wine. It didn’t make sense for our Neolithic ancestors to do additional work of removing grape skins from the wine. Of course, this then begs a to-date-unanswered question: why do we do the additional work now of removing the skins of white-skinned grapes but not red-skinned grapes?