WineWhys

The term is more than a little misleading, but it’s hard to come up with any snappy alternative.

My friend Simon Woolf – who literally and figuratively wrote the (must-read) book on this genre – couldn’t title it “Orange Revolution” because Ukraine’s eponymous uprising was still too fresh in people’s minds and his book would have ended up getting filed under “politics” or “current events.” So he opted for “Amber Revolution,” which really doesn’t help and risks confusion with vin ambré, a delicious specialty of Catalan France

By no means all wines of this genre are orange or amber in hue. Some of them are the deepest and most appealing shades of red. Others are more in line color-wise with what are known as rosés or vins gris, in ranging from straw through rose gold, and “partridge eye” to copper.

There’s not even a snappy three- or four-word expression to collectively and correctly characterize these wines. While the French have settled on vins oranges, my colleagues in Austria and Germany – while some use the English term “orange wine” (which now even has an utterly daft and inappropriate technical definition in Austrian wine law) – have widely adopted maischevergorene Weine. Besides sounding as hideous as it looks, this is completely misleading. Because what it translates as is simply “skin-fermented wine” and all red wine is skin-fermented.

Orange wine has become widely associated with so-called “natural wine.” But that, too, is misleading.  There is no intrinsic connection. People who style themselves as producers of “natural wine” simply tend to be more open to unorthodox methods and results. Often, too, they like to associate themselves with time-honored or even ancient methodologies that went into eclipse during the 20^th century, and that description certainly fits the skin-fermentation of green-golden or pale-purplish grapes.  

But here’s all you really need to know:

• Any wine resulting from skin-fermentation of grapes that cannot be used to make “red” wines (i.e. aren’t deep purple or blackish-blue in color) goes under the misleading rubric “orange wine.”
• Calling a wine “orange” tells you little more about the color it will actually exhibit than does calling it – no less misleadingly – “white,”, “red,” or “rosé.”
• Most importantly, calling a wine “orange” tells you no more about how it will taste, than does calling a wine “white,”, “red,” or “rosé”!