What is Orange Wine

Orange wine or Amber wine as it is called in Georgia, is a wine that is made from white grapes but in the same way as red wine, i.e leaving the skins on during fermentation. While in the process of making white wine there is very little contact between the skins and the grapes, in the case of Orange wine, the grapes will be fermented with their skins on for anything from 1 week and up to a year. The resulting wine will not only have a much more amber or intense golden colour but it will also be more complex and higher in tannin. Orange wine can be made from different grape varieties for example Pinot Grigio especially in Italy called Ramato or Rkatsiteli which is a white grape primarily found in Georgia.

Where Orange Wine Comes From

Although it seems like a new phenomenon, Orange wine is by no means new, in fact it is ancient and dates back to 6000 B.C produced in what today we call Georgia.

Georgia is also assumed to be the birthplace of wine in general and has one of the highest numbers of grapevines with more than 500 out of around 4000 in the world.

Traditionally this wine was fermented in egg-shaped clay vessels called qvevri which where buried in the ground to keep the wine cool. Today this method has crossed the borders of Georgia and is now used in the production of Orange wine in Italy, Greece, Slovenia, France and other places around the world.

Georgia still remains one of the biggest qvevri producers where the technique is passed on from generation to generation and involves manually building the clay vessels which can be of different sizes and then firing them up for around 3 days in order to dry the clay after which the insides are waxed to prevent the underground humidity from getting into the vessel. Once the wines undergo fermentation, the qvevri is covered (in the ancient time it was sealed with beeswax) and the wine is left to age.

Not all Orange wines are made in qvevri especially outside of Georgia. Egg shaped concrete and stainless steel vessels or oak barrels can also be used.

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