Wine Guides

Orange Wine: A Guide to Skin Contact Whites

The oldest way of making wine is also the one people find hardest to place. Here is what actually happens in the tank, and eight bottles from our shelves that show how far the style can stretch.

Orange wine is the most misunderstood category in the shop, largely because of its name. There are no oranges involved, and it is not a blend of red and white. It is simply white wine made the way red wine has always been made: instead of pressing the juice off the grapes and fermenting it clean, the skins are left in.

That single decision changes everything. It is also, historically speaking, the norm rather than the exception. Fermenting on skins is what winemakers did for several thousand years before temperature control and pneumatic presses made pale, aromatic whites possible. In Georgia, where wine has been made in buried clay qvevri for around 8,000 years, the practice never stopped.

What the skins actually do

Grape skins carry the compounds that juice does not: tannins, colour pigments, flavonols and a range of aromatic precursors. Leave the juice in contact with them and all of it is drawn out into the wine.

The colour comes first, moving from straw to gold to burnished amber depending on how long the skins stay in and how ripe they were. Then comes the texture. Tannin in a white wine is unexpected the first time you meet it: a faint drying grip at the back of the palate, closer to strong tea than to a young Bordeaux, but unmistakably there. It gives the wine a shape and a finish that most whites simply do not have.

There is a practical consequence too. Those same phenolic compounds are natural antioxidants, so a skin contact wine is far more resistant to oxidation than a conventional white. That is why so many of these wines are made with very little added sulphur, and why the category overlaps so heavily with natural and low-intervention winemaking. It is cause and effect rather than fashion.

One clarification worth making: orange wine is not rosé. Rosé is red grapes given a short time on skins. Orange wine is white grapes given a long one. The two arrive at similar colours by opposite routes.

A spectrum, not a style

This is the part most guides skip. "Orange wine" describes a technique, not a flavour, and the range within it is enormous. A few days on skins gives you a white wine with a little more grip and body, something most drinkers would not identify as orange at all. Several months gives you a deeply amber, tannic, savoury wine that behaves like a red at the table.

Vessel matters as much as time. Clay, whether Georgian qvevri, Sicilian amphora or Spanish tinaja, is porous, so it allows a slow, gentle exchange of oxygen that softens tannin and builds complexity. Stainless steel keeps things bright and primary. Old oak sits somewhere between the two.

So rather than ask whether you like orange wine, it is more useful to ask where on the spectrum you want to sit. Here are eight bottles from our collection, arranged from the gentlest end to the most emphatic.

1. Ease in

Short maceration, aromatic fruit still in the driving seat. If you have been curious but nervous, start here.

2. Clay, and the oldest method of all

Fermented in terracotta rather than steel or oak. The vessel breathes, and the wines carry a particular savoury depth as a result.

3. Full amber, long maceration

Months on skins rather than days. Deep colour, real tannin, and a savoury complexity that puts these firmly at the dinner table.

4. Texture rather than tannin

The serious, quietly built end of the category, where skin contact is used as one tool among several rather than the whole point.

Getting the best out of the bottle

Serve it cool, not cold. Around 12 to 14°C is the sweet spot. Fridge temperature mutes the aromatics and makes the tannin taste harsher than it is. Twenty minutes out of the fridge, or half an hour in it from room temperature, will get you there.

Use a proper glass. These wines have the aromatic complexity of a red, so give them the volume of one. A small white wine glass will strangle them.

Decant the bigger ones. Anything at the long maceration end benefits from air. Ageno in particular opens up over an hour and keeps improving over two or three days in the fridge once opened.

Expect some sediment. Many of these are unfiltered and unfined. A little haze or deposit is a sign of how the wine was made, not a fault.

What to eat with it

This is where orange wine earns its keep. The combination of tannin, texture and savoury depth means it handles the food that defeats most whites and most reds alike.

Fragrant, spiced cooking is the obvious home: Keralan and Sri Lankan curries, Sichuan, Ethiopian, North African tagines. Fermented and pickled things work brilliantly, so kimchi, miso, aged cheeses and cured meats all sit comfortably alongside. So does anything with a bitter or umami edge, from artichokes to roasted brassicas to mushrooms. Iberico ham, tartiflette and a good hard sheep's cheese are all natural partners.

It is also the single most useful bottle to have open when a table is eating several different things at once, which is a rarer quality than it sounds.

Also worth a look

More skin contact wines currently on the shelves:

• Maremosso Catarratto 2024, Sicily
• Vinessens Casa Balaguer Tragolargo Moscatel-Malvasia 2025, Spain
• Ruth Lewandowski Tatto 2023, USA
• Frederick Stevenson Morbinos 2021, Australia
• Turnau Ambre 2022
• Heinrich Graue Freyheit 2022, Austria