What is orange wine?

With orange wine, the juice of white grapes stays on the skins during fermentation, and sometimes on the stems too, exactly as happens with red wine. With ordinary white wine, the juice is separated from the skins right away.

Colour, tannin and flavour compounds come out of that skin. The result is a wine with an orange to amber hue, a firmer mouthfeel and more savoury and oxidative notes than an ordinary white wine. The Wine and Spirit Education Trust describes the tannin in these wines as firm but refined, at the medium plus level.

The maceration ranges from a few hours to a few months, depending on the maker. Wine Spectator gives as examples about ten days for one bottling line of the house of Radikon and almost four months for the other.

At the long end is the method of Josko Gravner: crush the grapes, fill the amphora three-quarters full, ferment on native yeast, six months on the skins with punching down five to six times a day, then press and age for six years in large oak casks. Scientific work from the University of Turin used shorter series: 0, 2, 7 and 14 days of maceration at 18 degrees.

The phenol content doubles after two days of maceration and quadruples after fourteen days compared with wine without skin contact, research from the University of Turin shows. Condensed tannin was found only in the samples of 7 and 14 days.

After fourteen days that amounted to 513 milligrams per liter in arneis and 708 milligrams per liter in erbaluce. A review study from 2025 lists the total phenols: 1,645 to 2,103 milligrams per liter GAE for macerated white wines from Friuli and Croatia, 1,296 to 2,290 for the Georgian Kakhetian method, against 210 to 456 milligrams per liter for ordinary white wine. South Italian wines with four months of maceration reached 5,682 to 6,670 milligrams per liter, higher than the range of 282 to 3,200 that is cited for red wine.

The oldest tradition lies in Georgia, where juice, skins, stalks and pips go together into an egg-shaped earthenware qvevri buried in the ground. UNESCO placed that method on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013. The wine stays in it for five to six months.

The modern revival comes from Friuli-Venezia Giulia and neighbouring Slovenia. Josko Gravner of Oslavia experimented with skin contact on ribolla gialla after the hail-struck harvest of 1996, travelled to Georgia to get to know the qvevri and made his first wine that way in 2001. Stanko Radikon, Dario Princic and Slovenian makers such as Aleks Klinec and Ales Kristancic followed. The term orange wine itself only came into use in the early 2000s, as a practical description of the colour.

Gravner advises serving orange wine at the temperature of a red wine, so clearly warmer than an ordinary white wine. The tannin and the firm mouthfeel make that plausible.

With food the wine also behaves more like a red. Wine Spectator points to the interplay of lively acids and lightly chalky tannin, which counterbalances rich dishes. The colour runs from orange to amber, and with long ageing a browner shade is added. Aroma of orange peel and walnut is often mentioned. Measurements show that absorption at 420 nanometres, the wavelength for brown tones, clearly increases the longer the maceration lasts.