Did you know Orange wine is actually made out of oranges?!

Picture this, it's friday night and you walk into your favourite wine store and you see this bottle of wine, its orange, well more like a salmon pink orange sort of colour and you think, what's next? Why are people making this stuff? Can't we just be happy with a Pinot noir or a Pinot gris. Hell no!

Let's talk orange wine, and sorry its not actually made from oranges, just wanted to grab your attention.

I wanted my first post to be a fun topic, and mostly wanted to show you what sort of things we'll be talking about. Firstly, I want to educate and talk about wine in the most fun way possible, not using words no one really knows, or throwing in words like acidity, minerality , purity of fruit (Huh??) but being able to help you understand this actually really cool world that is WINE! Wine isn't just an alcoholic beverage, something that goes with dinner, something to bring to your favourite BYO, it is history and culture, geography and place. It's hundreds of years of heritage in a family, and it's Dave from Central Otago who just loved gardening and turned it into a winery. The more you taste and learn, the more hooked you'll be!

 "Wine isn't just an alcoholic beverage, something that goes with dinner, something to bring to your favourite BYO, it is history and culture, geography and place"

So let's get back to this stuff, ORANGE WINE. Oh it's noice, it's different (excuse the Kath and Kim reference) but that's what it is. In a nutshell it's made simply from green grapes usually made for white wines. The bottle pictured above is the Selection Massale - Orange made from the grape varities Riesling and Zibibbo (Also known as Muscat of Alexandria.)

To start, the vineyard crew have gone out into the vineyard, picked up a bunch of grapes and brought them back to the winery. At the winery the winemaker has grabbed all those grapes and pressed them, seperating the juice inside from the seeds and outer skins. Now generally with white wine making, all those skins and seeds which have been seperated from the juice will say 'see you later' and off to the bin they go. But now with orange wine, they actually put the skins back into the juice. Riiiiiiiight. Generally, the juice will be in a stainless steel tank ( The funky guys will put that juice into oak) and then all those skins get tipped back in. So now it gets fun, the skins then .. fancy word.. macerate ( which just means soak in a liquid ) which incorporates the flavours of the skins into the wine. This process can take anywhere from 2 weeks till as long as the winemaker determines which style they want to create. The skins create more texture and flavours that can include orange rind or nutmeg, really all depends on the grape variety. The result of the skin contact creates, you guessed it, and orange wine. ( Also known as Amber or Romato in Italy.) . It's pretty cool, and I can imagine the first guys who stumbled across it were excited.

For the history guys, it's pretty hard to determine who actually invented this winemaking style. What we do know that in 6000BC in Georgia, the country, not the state, they had a vessel called a Kvevri/ Qvevri - (Kev - ree) which is one of the first known vessels used for winemaking. They are clay vessels lined with a beeswax, then put completely underground to either

ferment in the natural elements of the

earth OR after fermentation & sealed with stones for several years. The grape choice for this is/was called Rkatsiteli (Oar - kat - seh - telly), which was a wine of a deep red, orange hue. Remember there is about 10,000 grape varities out there to choose and drink so it might take us a while to learn them all! See the pic above, how cool.

So we have history dating back to 6000BC but honestly this winemaking style only really came back into fashion about 20-25 years ago. Jump to 2024, there are so many producers creating weird, funky, wonderful wines. If we want to know who to thank for, so to speak, bringing orange wine back to life, it's a winemaker in Italy. Josko Gravner. Pretty well known dude, doing really fun things in the region. The region he is based in is a place called Friulli - Venezia Giulia. Located in the north - west of Italy, it produces some of the best Pinot Grigio and local grape varities. We won't get into Italy or Italian grapes in this post buuuut just for some more crazy grape varities, orange wine made from here can be produced from Friulano, Malvazia, Ribolla Gialla or the one we know, Pinot Grigio, among many more. They may just look like words, but these grape varities produce wines that in my opinion taste like Italy in a glass. This orange wine is made all over the world, im talking USA, France, South Africa, Austria and Australia. Winemakers are experimenting all over the place!

Okay, enough, what's it taste like? I went down to my local little boutique wine store and picked up this bottle of Orange by prodcuers Selection Massale. It is labeled as Riverland - Wine of Australia 2022. Organically grown, unfiltered, unfined and vegan. Its a very natural wine, left for the elements to shine. In my opinion you can really smell that. On the nose, it was very mandarin, floral, but it just had this subtle smell of a plaster. ( Say whaaat, that's a good thing. When you can get a subtle smell like this, its from the skin contact.) On the palate, it was very textural and acidic, but soft like peaches and marmalade. I liked it, would go perfect with a snapper or a ceaser salad. Good finish on the palate, dry enough for those summer afternoons. It's just a little different, and in this day and age, that's awesome.

There you have it, a wee snippet into a new wine for you to taste and tick off the list. It's weird, it's not exactly normal, but it's fun. Don't know if you feel like a white, but you defintely don't want a heavy red, grab a bottle. I always like to leave my posts with something fancy to say about wine at the dinner table, so hit them with this. " Did you know that orange wine, isnt always orange. In fact, it was a UK merchant who went over to Italy, called it Orange wine and it just stuck. It can actually range from pink to yellow." Maybe just bring a bottle of orange wine with you and you'll seem like a geek in no time. ;)

Salute,

Sam x