62 63 Nº 3 0 6 THE LOIRE VALLEY WO R D S JOEL HART the novelty may have diminished, the wines are more entrenched,” he says. “You have orange sections on wine lists, on the shelves of independent wine merchants and on the list of internet retailers. The success of orange wine has gone hand-in-hand with the growth of natural wines. Consumers still need reassurance and education, but when you have supermarkets with their versions of orange wine, then you realise that the wines are part of the everyday scene.” What is clear is that we are at a turning point. As it has proliferated to the point of becoming common knowledge, it has also found itself in the wrong hands, and fears about quality have circulated. Michael Sager, whose wine bar Sager & Wilde on Hackney Road was one of the first to push orange wine in London, says: “It’s so difficult to make a good white wine in a shorter amount of time than you can a THE FUTURE’S Orange? I t was around the mid-tens that I first became enticed by the intriguing flavours and exuberant textures orange wines offer. At this point, they were still relatively niche in the UK (in 2016, veteran wine writer Hugh Johnson called them “a sideshow”) but their popularity continued to spread, with the aid of a growing natural wine scene in London. In 2020, it was still seen as divisive, as New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov suggested, and the jury was still out on whether it was a fad. Now, you can grab a bottle of Vin Orange for a mere £8.50 at Asda, £8.99 at Waitrose, £10.50 at M&S or £11.99 at Majestic. Has orange wine officially entered the mainstream? Doug Wregg is the Sales and Marketing Director of Les Caves Des Pyrenes, the UK’s largest importer of organic, biodynamic, and natural wines, and orange wines by default. He thinks it may well have. “Whilst skinsky orange. The skins, during fermentation and afterwards, stabilise the wine, and the wine is ready to go, and you don’t have to worry about mouse and volatile acidity so much.” But this may have an adverse effect. “You might resort to orange because it’s faster, but you may not have the know-how, and at that point, you’re pouring out shit wine,” Sager suggests. Sasa Radikon—who is the head winemaker at Radikon, an estate esteemed for the quality of its orange wines—feels such fears are beginning to be put to bed. “The fame and reputation of macerated wine has attracted producers who normally did not produce this type of wine. Surely consumers who approach those macerated wines for the first time could denigrate the style, but the real ‘skin lovers’ can recognise a good wine from an improvised wine.” As the mania settles, is a consensus emerging on how to ensure high-quality orange wines in the future? Perhaps supermarket versions can offer an accessible gateway to the real thing, but the growth of orange wine goes hand-in-hand with the rise of sustainable viticulture, which Wregg feels is crucial to the future of the drink. “As with any great wines, farming is the key,” Wregg insists. “Careful farming using organic and biodynamic methods to ensure high quality grapes with excellent maturity is essential if you want to make wines that convincingly reflect a sense of place. The skins are an important part of flavour—they carry much of the wine’s DNA, its aromatic profile, its textural component.” The future of orange wine also hinges first on the base material. Which white wine grapes and in which areas are suited to maceration? 64 65 Nº 3 0 6 THE LOIRE VALLEY “To make a good orange wine you need to have inherently aromatic base material,” says Sager. The more obvious grape varietals are Zibbibo, Malvasia, Gewürztraminer, Moscatel, and Sauvignon Blanc, but many feel Pinot Gris and Riesling can also work really well. Closely related to grape varietal are geography and terroir. It was Sasa Radikon’s father, Stanko, and Josko Gravner, who, in the early noughties, simultaneously drew the wine world’s attention to the Friuli-Venezia Giulia/ Oslavia border area of Italy and Slovenia where orange wine making has a strong history. Returning to what they saw as the pre-industrial way of making wine in these regions, Radikon make zero-sulphur wines from Pinot Gris, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Ribolla Gialla and Tocai Friulano, with a few month’s maceration on skins, followed by four years ageing in oak barrels (the Pinot Gris cuvée is treated differently), bottling them in now iconic 500ml and 1l bottles, and releasing them after further years of bottle age. Gravner is famed for long skin-fermentation of Ribolla Gialla grapes only in Georgian qvevri (amphora vessels buried underground), followed by years of maturation in oak barrels, but small amounts of sulphur to protect the wines during maturation. “In these areas orange wines have developed because it’s a suitable area (climate/soil),” Radikon says. “We are trying to put our climate J O E L H A R T U T H E F U T U R E ' S O R A N G E ? involved considerable experimentation and failure, years of practice have led us to understand what works and what doesn’t, and a stylistic diversity has emerged, with some of the early advocates moving away from skin-fermentation altogether. “Reduction can protect the wine, or you can have skin-fermentation. They’re the two ways to work with white grapes without sulphur,” says Sager. It is this duality that has underpinned the journey of Frank Cornelissen, one of the renowned progenitors of the natural wine movement. Working on the volcanic soils of Mount Etna with indigenous white grapes Grecanico Dorato, Carricante, and Coda di Volpe, Cornelissen began making zero-sulphur orange wines in 2001 with long skin-fermentation in amphorae. He tells me, “one of the bold statements I once said was, I’m not a racist, so why would I vinify white wines differently to red wines? Which makes total sense, but then you discover the world is not a black and white place and there’s a lot of grey zone in the middle.” While Cornelissen makes changes on an annual basis and sees winemaking as a process in constant evolution, in 2015, he made a radical change. “Why did I stop doing skin fermentation? It’s really simple. It’s a taste issue. They were really nice for drinking, but they were too evolved, too oxidised.” Cornelissen’s aim has always been to accurately express the diverse terroirs of Etna, which eventually led him to prefer the precision, tightness and focus of white wine made more classically. “Especially,” he says, “on the varieties we have, when and our grapes in a glass bottle.” Mateja Gravner, who heads up the Gravner Vineyard today, adds, “different historical, social and human factors have influenced the fact that orange wines were born in Friuli. As Gravner, we do our utmost to allow Ribolla to express itself at its best and this is our goal. We have never had an interest in launching new trends.” Wregg’s interest in orange wine also began with this region. “All the wines are profound and feel deeply rooted in place and time. And that is surely what terroir is all about,” he says. Friuli-Venezia Giulia/Oslavia’s success has led to the widespread consensus that the best orange wines come from regions where they were historically made. Whilst Friuli may be the most important region, Sager points out that “Italy has a deeply steeped history of maceration.” From Friuli down through Abruzzo, Campania and into Sicily, great orange wines using local Italian grapes are being made, suggesting it is only those areas without an historic tradition of growing white grapes—Piedmont and Tuscany being the key examples—that tend to focus on technologically made direct-press Chardonnays, likely for the American market. Georgia—where orange winemaking never stopped, Austria, and now Alsace in France, have also come to be seen as suitable regions for orange wine production. While the early days of orange winemaking The skins are an important part of flavour— they carry much of the wine’s DNA, its aromatic profile, its textural component 66 Nº 30 6 THE L OIR E V AL L E Y you’re working with very delicate grapes with less colour and less aromatic components.” From 2015, the white wines were fermented without their skin, and aged in fiberglass epoxy tanks rather than epoxy-lined amphora. But does this mean they can no longer be called skin-contact wines? Not exactly. “You have skin contact in an alcoholic environment, which is wine, and you also have skin contact in a water environment, before the wine ferments, so in the juice of the grapes. Those are entirely different worlds. Alcohol extracts in a very different way than water. Imagine using alcohol to extract a flower, you would extract a very harsh, intense aroma.” This way, Cornelissen is able to extract phenols and flavours, without tannins and intense pigments. For Sager, this would still count as a skin-contact wine, even if closer in style to a white wine, as Cornelissen intends. “I include maceration on my orange section even if it doesn’t look orange. If you’re looking at orange wine being anything that’s not white. anything not direct press.” For Sager, this is important because “those wines are the history of wine. Pre-1850s, pre-industrial white wine. If you’re doing a basket press for instance, that would take 3 or 4 hours, so there would be some skin contact there.” Something closer to this style may even come to be the more dominant version of ‘skin-contact’ wine. As Wregg says, “it is fair enough to say that virtually every natural wine producer will experiment with skin maceration wines—maybe one, maybe several iterations. However, it is equally fair to say that we have witnessed an evolution of the orange style ranging from the more traditional intense and extractive amber wines to the more delicate skin contact versions with light or partial maceration.” But crucially, “it is not a binary choice.” “I think customers may be too hung up on colour rather than focusing on what skin contact adds to the wine,” Wregg clarifies. “For people to understand orange wine, they have to know how the majority of white wines are made. If we don’t want to make things too obscure, we can surely say that there are as many styles and shades of orange wines as there are of whites and reds. This is also why wine lists should have different interpretations of orange wine rather than a single example to represent the many thousands out there.” Orange wine sales are predicted to go up over the next decade, but maybe at the end of it we’ll see light-maceration versions as entirely different categories to their tea-like tiger-hued counterparts. Or maybe we’ll realise that categorization is a hindrance rather than an aid. As Wregg puts it, “their mutability is what makes them so interesting.” J O E L H A R T U T H E F U T U R E ' S O R A N G E ? For people to understand orange wine, they have to know how the majority of white wines are made