🍷 Orange wine

Orange wine is white wine fermented together with the grape skins, which turns it amber-orange and gives it grip; the name comes from the colour, not from oranges. Since 2020 the OIV calls it “white wine with maceration”: white varieties only, at least a month of maceration. EU law has no separate orange wine category.

Definition 4.9 in OIV resolution OIV-ECO 647-2020 describes a white wine made from grape juice fermented in prolonged contact with the pomace: skins, pulp, seeds, sometimes stems. The requirements: white varieties, contact of at least one month, and the colour may be orange-amber with a tannic taste. The resolution was certified on 26.11.2020. It is a recommendation of the International Code, not an EU regulation.

The classic tradition is Georgian. According to UNESCO (2013), the juice with skins is placed in a qvevri, buried in the ground, and the wine ferments for five to six months. Georgia's National Wine Agency adds that white varieties stay on the chacha until spring, and in a buried qvevri the temperature is stable, 13–15 °C. The oldest chemical traces of grape wine in Georgia date to roughly 6000–5800 BC, but they say nothing about skin contact.

According to a wine magazine, the term “orange wine” was introduced in 2004 by the British importer David Harvey. In Friuli and Slovenia, Radikon, Gravner, Movia and Jure Štekar revived the style in the late 1990s and early 2000s (Wine Spectator).

"Orange" is not an EU legal term, so the word alone guarantees nothing on a label. By the OIV definition, a few days of skin contact do not yet make a wine of this kind.