No, an orange wine is not made from oranges! Nor is it a wine from the Orange region in NSW. An orange wine is made from grapes like every other wine. It's typically solely white grapes and it's made in more of a red grape/red wine way.
The most common way to make an orange wine, is to first take white grape bunches (often including stems), crush them up, and then put them in a large vessel (usually cement or ceramic). Then, you typically leave the fermenting grapes alone for several days to sometimes over a year, with the skins, seeds and stems still attached.
This is a natural process that uses little to no additives, sometimes not even yeast. Orange wines are natural wines. The process of making orange wine is ancient, as far back as 5,000 years in Caucasus (modern-day Georgia) where wines fermented in large subterranean vessels called Qvevri (“Kev-ree”) that were originally closed with stones and sealed with beeswax.
Due to lengthy skin-contact, orange wines are textural and bold, with honeyed aromas of jackfruit (a fleshy tropical fruit), hazelnut, brazil nut, bruised apple, wood varnish, linseed oil, juniper, sourdough, and dried orange rind. On the palate, they’re big, dry, and even have tannin like a red wine with a sourness similar to fruit beer.
A small number of adventurous winemakers are using carbonic maceration to make orange wines, as a variation on the overarching theme of skin-contact, phenolic whites.
Orange wines are great food wines. Pair with anything from curries to beef or meaty fish.
We sell some amazing orange wines. Enjoy!
References
Wine Folly 2021, ‘Everything You Want to Know About Orange Wine’ <https://winefolly.com/deep-dive/orange-wine/>, viewed 1 June 2021.
