From the New Yorker. I particularly liked “gradually becoming slightly less bad”.
How the Orange-Wine Fad Became an Irresistible Assault on Pleasure
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António Maçanita, one of my favorite oenologists, produced an orange wine that doesn’t taste like junk: Laranja Mecânica. It’s the only one I’ve ever truly liked.
I once had a Georgian orange wine at a wine bar and it was delicious with its Black Sea salt attack.
Other than that, I had a Vodopivec Vitovska from Friuli which I consider more an exercise in intellect than in degustation.
I get your view here, but I will say that
(i) I love this wine, and a number of other Orange wines (but lean towards those that use a lighter hand on the skin contact, as many are way overdone),
(ii) they are definitely an acquired taste, both in general over time, and even over a period of minutes/hours with respect to any given bottle (i.e. you may think you have it after your first 3 sips…but the more sips you take, the more you come to enjoy),
(iii) they generally show much, much better if they’re not nearly as cold as a white wine…I enjoy them slightly chilled, perhaps at cellar temperature (57 degrees) or 3-4 degrees lower, but certainly not colder than 50, and
(iv) they can pair very well with certain foods that are difficult to match with wine…things like asparagus, certain seafood dishes (including heavy/rich seafood dishes with cream sauce, and also uni and uni-flavored dishes (like Spaghetti Ricci, essentially pasta tossed with pureed uni).
Orange wines are a very useful food tool and can pair with things almost nothing else can do. I also feel, as John said, that many are overdone and prefer those with a lighter hand. I’ve never wanted to simply sit and sip an orange wine, but I have been stunned by an orange wine and food pairing enough times at restaurants to be a believer.
Some say they are an acquired taste, and I enjoy them moderately chilled on a hot day and given time to open, and definitely paired well with food. I picked up some from Artem on Berserker Day 2 (or so) years back, enjoyed it. And I believe Dirty and Rowdy make a Familiar Orange that I’d like to give a spin once I clear some space.
There are some great ones (especially in Austria) … and a lot weak ones … (further South)
The great ones are fine with food …
I’ve never had an Austrian version of orange wine, but I love Austrian whites and would love to give it a try. (If you have any specific recs/favorites that might be available in the U.S., please share!) Most all of the ones I’ve had were from Carso/Friuli or Slovenia, and the rest have been either elsewhere in Italy (Sicily, Umbria, etc.), or from other countries (such as the U.S.) attempting their hand at orange wines, and most of those have seemed overdone. The best of the orange wines have a great deal of complexity along with a pronounced juicy, mouth-watering (by which I don’t mean “delicious” but literally as in “saliva inducing”), with an exotic combination of iced tea, orange and honey flavors plus an almost pinot noir-like flavor profile that, together the light tannins, I think could easily fool someone tasting with eyes closed into thinking it must be a red wine. The worst of them all taste (similarly) of wheat beer or Hefeweizen (with their characteristic addition of citrus, either added to the beer or included in the brew) plus not much else.
MUSTER “Erde” or Gräfin"…
My favorite by far, a charming semi-sparkling, hails from Greece: the 2017 Domaine Glinavos Paleokerisio. Perfect for pre-gaming an Easter parade, it was softly floral and grassily festive, but with a body as firm as a maypole. Lettie Teague, who devoted a Wall Street Journal column to orange wine, in May, also admired this bottle, but her tasting companions, being hard-core orange-wine guys, dissed its extreme pleasantness as unserious. Here, we encounter the fervor of ideologues, which is the soul of the trend. As Teague wrote, “People ‘believe’ in orange wines in a way I’ve never known anyone to espouse a faith in, say, Chardonnay.”
This stuff pairs well with the conflated ethics and aesthetics of bien-pensant food culture. The intrinsic emphasis on abstruse methods of production and challenging nuances of terroir suits going fashions for the sustainable, the “authentic.” > You get the sense, when gripped by the vinegar-ish bite of an extra-ripe wine, that it is ideally consumed at a reclaimed-wood table in the dining room of a Hudson Valley weekend home, while listening to a proud host holding forth on how best to decant it and describing its intricate flavors and idiosyncratic kinks with the haranguing passion of an indie-rock record collector.
It’s possible I have the wrong idea about wine, but I consume it precisely because I think its primary purpose is to give pleasure. That’s not to say that a good wine isn’t revelatory or an object of contemplation (the very best wines are both of those things!).This nonsense about it needing to be bad as a way of elevating or legitimizing its intellectual qualities? Imagine having such a need for a “thing” that you turn to something that’s legitimately unpleasant just so you can maintain some sense of exclusivity.
That all being said, I’ve had a few skin macerated wines that were lovely. Meinklang’s Weisser Mulatschak is a mild orange wine that I think would be a good introduction for the otherwise uninitiated. Also Day Wines Tears of Vulcan (63% Viognier, 21% Pinot gris, 16% Musca) and Vin de Days L’Orange (37% Gewürztraminer, 33% Riesling, 30% Müller-Thurgau). I’ve tried a few Georgian skin contact wines that I liked too. I just ordered some of D&R’s orange goodness too after enjoying their more widely available wines.
Also while we’re on the topic, I know some of the color is due to botrytis but is Lillian’s Roussanne also technically an orange wine?
Never has Austrian either. However the grand poobah of orange wine is south of Austria making top notch bottles aging in amphora, wild yeast, low tech; all in northern Italy (Collio as I recall). Gravner makes the most unique expressions hands down IMO.
That pretty much sums it up. Good orange wines aren’t good because they are orange but because they are good.
And as Sarah says they can be fantastic matches for certain foods. Levi did an orange wine dinner about a decade or so ago which was revelatory.
I also keep backing away from the overly big ones. Gravner, Kabaj and Radikon give me very little pleasure - they’re just too heavy-handed and serious. Absolutely no fruit. But when it’s done in a lighter style, either by shorter time on skins, or less of them, or blending, they can be a nice pleasure. I particularly enjoyed Paetra’s skin-contact Riesling a year or so back - absolutely stellar (unfortunately he doesn’t have any left). Koehnen Wine Company’s skin-contact Sauvignon Blanc is also a stellar example to try here from CA.
Thanks, Charlie! I hope you dig it. The Familiar Orange is fresh and bright. We are happy with it.
It’s a big world. I agree some of the more extreme ones are excellent, while most no so much. Perhaps the common thread is most amateurs just winging it are going to go to the extreme, while talented winemakers will bring all sorts of insights to a new project (and wouldn’t be happy releasing a failed experiment).
We were inspired by Pietro Buttitta’s Rosa d’Oro Vermentino, which would get 8 or 9 days on it’s skins. Prior to that, I’d only had orange wines that were sort of a trade off. Loss of things like fresh, floral aromatics and varietal character in exchange for savory, tea, texture, etc. and often oxidative, murky, VA, overly tannic. Not his. It was a vibrant, focused wonderful Vermentino, with added complexity and some tannin from the skin. I loved it. (He’s an excellent chef/winemaker operating Prima Materia out of Oakland.)
I’m quite happy with my Semillon experiment (some here have had it). The point was to maintain the aromatics and avoid oxidation. 7 days. Very light press. Finish in carboy. At one year it had a rough tannic feel that made it a food wine. A second year rounded it out nicely to where I really like it. At Harrington we played around quite a bit. Grenache Blanc that had its flavors, aromatics and no green at 19 brix. 7 days, pressed clear, but has developed a little tint with time. Pinot Gris (well, ramato is a related style, gris rather than blanc grapes, made as a red). Ribolla Giala done in amphora. A portion of our Falanghina done open top. It just kept getting better and better. Rich golden fruit and spice. Amazing. Bryan kept pushing it to see where it would go and pressed when it finally started declining, like 3 weeks along! Seriously, if there’s any grape in the world I’d like to play with right now it’s Falanghina to do skin contact experiments with. I think it’s hands-down the most suitable grape for this and could likely exceed any skin contact white made - in the right hands.
Being familiar with the characteristics of of shorter skin contact whites, some of the off-the-beaten-path wines we try blind show that. Sometimes there’s no winemaking info to be found, so it’s inconclusive. Other times it’s known by the person who brought it or findable. The point of being interested in one of these is when they are a standout wine. Grape and region you may have never heard of, but the winemaker is perhaps getting more than ever before out of it. Maybe it’s 3 days on the skins, maybe a grape in the mix that gives that impression, but definitely not some crude binary choice.
I find a big challenge with shorter maceration times (days vs. weeks or months) is that you get the full pH shift without many of the benefits of extended maceration. Shorter maceration wines can be broad but not deep and their tannins angular vs developed.
I do think Semillon can handle the shorter macerations due to the thin skins and that it is often “ripe” at relatively low brix.
If the color does not come from skin maceration, then: no.
They also seem to age pretty well, becoming more complex and mellow.
Big fan here.
Best, Jim
I was hoping someone familiar with the wine could give some input, This is from the Lillian site:
The challenge is to figure out a way to make a complete and totally gentle extraction of the aromas in the thick-skinned berries and often-present (and welcome) botrytis. To this end, > we macerate and ferment this fruit on the skins for three to five days, gently washing the skins with the juice twice a day> , just until the fermentation progresses far enough that the aromatics crack open and rise from the fruit.
I haven’t had the roussanne and was wondering if this was an anomaly for the vintage or if this was consistent across vintages for Lillian. The roussanne is definitely difficult to track down and I wasn’t sure if anyone could verify whether or not it might fit the profile of some of the wines being discussed here.
Well, 3-5 days is more like a borderline case whether it is orange wine or not, since 3-5 days of maceration with red grapes rarely makes a red wine and normally the only criterion for an orange wine is it being a white wine vinified like a red wine. That wine sounds more like a white variety equivalent of what rosé wine is to a red wine. With some botrytis curveball thrown in.