Walk into any natural wine bar in London, New York, Copenhagen, or Melbourne right now and you will find orange wine on the list. It will probably be described as "funky," "oxidative," "amber," or "wild." It will be made by a producer with minimal intervention principles and probably served in a slightly oversized glass with enormous ceremony. It will be presented as cutting-edge.
Here is the thing: orange wine is the oldest way to make wine. What is new is that we forgot about it for several centuries — and that we are now rediscovering it with the bewilderment of people who have only ever known three categories.
What Orange Wine Actually Is
Orange wine is white wine made like red wine. That is the simplest way to say it. When you make standard white wine, you press the grapes immediately and separate the juice from the skins before fermentation. The skins — which contain colour, tannin, and a vast range of phenolic compounds — are discarded or used for other purposes. What ferments is clear juice, producing the pale, crisp, fruit-forward wines most of us think of when we think "white wine."
In orange winemaking, the skins stay in contact with the juice during fermentation — sometimes for days, sometimes for weeks or months. The tannins, pigments, and compounds in those skins leach into the wine, turning it amber or orange, giving it grip and texture, and producing an entirely different flavour profile. The same grape variety that makes a delicate, floral white wine will produce something earthy, textural, and deeply complex when made this way.
8,000 Years Old: The Georgian Origin
The oldest evidence of winemaking comes from Georgia — the country, not the state — specifically from the Caucasus region. Archaeologists have found qvevri (large clay vessels used for fermentation and storage) containing wine residue dating back to approximately 6,000 BC. These ancient winemakers did not separate their skins from their juice. The grapes went in whole, fermented together, and aged in clay buried in the earth. This is, essentially, orange wine. It is the original method.
Georgia's Rkatsiteli and Mtsvane grapes, fermented this way in qvevri, produce wines unlike anything in the European mainstream. Amber-hued, tannic, layered with dried apricot, walnut, beeswax, and something almost savoury. The country still produces these wines in large quantities. They have never been trendy in Georgia. They have simply always been wine.
The Forgotten Centuries
So why did we lose this method? The industrialisation of wine production in the 18th and 19th centuries brought temperature-controlled fermentation, mechanical pressing, and the ability to make lighter, more consistent white wines at scale. Consumer preference shifted toward the pale, clean, fruit-forward whites that were now reliably producible everywhere.
The economic incentives all pointed the same direction: cleaner, faster, more controllable. Skin contact added complexity but also risk — the wines oxidised more easily, were harder to standardise, and required the kind of attention that small producers could give and large-scale operations could not. By the 20th century, skin-contact whites had essentially disappeared from mainstream winemaking in most regions.
The Modern Revival
The person most responsible for the modern rediscovery of orange wine in the Western consciousness is Josko Gravner, a winemaker from Friuli in northeastern Italy. In the late 1990s, Gravner visited Georgia, encountered qvevri winemaking, and returned to Italy to apply the method to his own Ribolla Gialla vines. He extended skin contact, bought qvevri, and produced wines that the Italian wine establishment initially rejected as faulty.
They were not faulty. They were extraordinary. When the natural wine movement gathered momentum in the 2000s — driven by producers, importers, and a wave of young drinkers who were exhausted by corporate winemaking — Gravner's amber wines and those of his Slovenian neighbours became touchstones. The rediscovery spread outward from Friuli and Slovenia to Georgia, to the Loire Valley, to Catalonia, to Australia, to California.
What Orange Wine Tastes Like (And What It Pairs With)
The short answer: it depends enormously on the grape, the region, and the length of skin contact. A wine with 24 hours of skin contact will be only lightly amber and might taste like a more textural, slightly tannic version of a conventional white. A wine fermented on skins for six months will be deeply coloured, powerfully tannic, and would pair with food in the way a red wine would.
Common flavour descriptors for orange wines include dried apricot and peach, walnut and almond, honey, chamomile, beeswax, dried flowers, and a characteristic savoury, almost nutty quality that comes from the phenolic compounds in the skins. The tannins mean they can handle food that would overwhelm conventional whites — roast chicken, aged cheeses, fatty fish, spiced dishes, charcuterie.
In the heat of summer, a chilled skin-contact white from Sicily or Georgia is one of the most satisfying wines in existence. It has the refreshing qualities of a white wine and the substance to carry a proper meal. It is extraordinarily food-friendly in a way that neither pale whites nor full reds quite manage.
The Natural Wine Connection
Orange wine and natural wine are not the same thing, although they are closely associated. Natural wine is a philosophy of minimal intervention — no added yeasts, no filtering, no sulphur or very little sulphur. You can make a natural orange wine or a conventionally produced orange wine. What unites them in practice is that most skin-contact producers tend toward natural methods because the style itself requires more care and attention than industrial winemaking permits.
The natural wine association has given orange wine both its current cultural cachet and most of its detractors. People who dislike natural wine tend to assume they dislike orange wine, and people who love natural wine evangelise about orange wine to the point of exhaustion. The truth is quieter: some orange wines are revelatory, some are faulty, and almost all of them reward the kind of attention that most wine simply does not ask for.
How to Approach It
If you have never had an orange wine, start with something from northeastern Italy — Friuli or Slovenia — which tends toward elegance rather than extreme oxidation. A Ramato (skin-contact Pinot Grigio) is often a gentle entry point. Serve it at around 12°C, colder than you would a red but warmer than you would a white. Eat something substantial with it. Do not approach it expecting conventional white wine and then be surprised when it is not one.
If you have already tried orange wine and found it challenging, try a different producer or region. This style varies more than almost any other in wine. A Georgian skin-contact Rkatsiteli and a light Italian Ribolla Gialla share a method but almost nothing else in the glass.
8,000 years ago, this was just wine. The category is not the trend. Our forgetting of it was.
The next time someone tells you that orange wine is a fad, you have a useful correction to offer. What is genuinely new is not the wine. It is the rediscovery of what wine originally was, before we decided to clean it up.