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Orange Wine: Greece's Textural, Skin-Contact Side
If you've never tried orange wine, the name can be slightly misleading.
Orange wine isn't made from oranges, and it isn't necessarily sweet. It's white wine made using a winemaking technique traditionally associated with red wine: the grapes ferment with their skins, sometimes for days, weeks or much longer.
That skin contact gives the wine its distinctive colour - from pale amber to deep orange - as well as texture, tannin and extra aromatic complexity.
And Greece is a particularly exciting place to explore the style.
With its wealth of indigenous grape varieties, old vines and growing natural wine movement, Greek winemakers are using skin contact to show familiar grapes in completely new ways.
What is orange wine?
Most white wines are made by pressing the grapes and separating the juice from the skins before fermentation.
With orange wine, the skins remain in contact with the juice during fermentation. This can extract colour, tannins, flavour compounds and texture from the skins. The longer the contact, the more pronounced these characteristics can become.
The result isn't simply a white wine with a darker colour. Orange wines can have a very different structure, often with a gentle tannic grip that you wouldn't normally associate with white wine.
They're also incredibly varied. Some are fresh and elegant, others are deeply textured and savoury, while natural versions can be deliberately wild and expressive.
Why Greece?
This is where things get particularly interesting.
Greece has an extraordinary collection of indigenous grape varieties, many of which have evolved over centuries to cope with hot, dry Mediterranean conditions.
Grapes such as Assyrtiko, Savatiano, Roditis and Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains can produce completely different wines depending on where they are grown and how they are made.
Skin contact offers another way of exploring those varieties.
Instead of simply focusing on freshness and fruit, the technique can bring out texture, savouriness, herbal notes and tannin, making the wines particularly versatile with food.
Deus Ex Machina: Orange Assyrtiko from Attica
One of my favourite examples is Deus Ex Machina Orange Assyrtiko from The Knack Project in Attica.
Assyrtiko is probably Greece's best-known white grape, usually associated with the volcanic island of Santorini. But this wine comes from Attica, and it takes the grape in a completely different direction.
The wine spends 18 months on its lees, with spontaneous fermentation using wild yeasts. It is unfined and unfiltered, with no added sulphites. Only 646 bottles were produced.
In the glass, it's deep orange in colour, with ripe fruit, floral notes, candied citrus peel and bergamot. On the palate, high acidity meets a gentle tannic grip and a rich, textured body.
It's a particularly good wine if you want to understand how dramatically winemaking and place can change the expression of a grape.
You can also read more about The Knack Project in my guide to this exciting natural wine producer.
Orange Assyrtiko from Rapsani
The second orange wine in the Pale Ruby Wine collection comes from Papadopoulos Viticulture, a small producer working with old vineyards in Rapsani, on the slopes of Mount Olympus.
Papadopoulos Orange Assyrtiko offers yet another expression of Assyrtiko. This time, the grape is grown in a very different mountain environment, cooled by the Aegean breeze and shaped by the high-altitude vineyards of Rapsani.
Papadopoulos works with a minimal-intervention approach, including spontaneous fermentation with wild yeasts, no temperature control and only a minimal addition of sulphur before bottling.
It's a fascinating comparison with Deus Ex Machina: same grape, different producer, different terroir and a different expression of orange wine.
If you're interested in the producer and the region, read Papadopoulos Viticulture: Rapsani Wines from the Slopes of Mount Olympus.
Orange wine isn't just for natural wine drinkers
Orange wine is particularly popular within the natural wine world, but the two aren't synonymous.
Orange describes a winemaking technique. Natural wine describes an approach to farming and winemaking. You can therefore have conventional orange wine, natural orange wine, filtered orange wine, unfiltered orange wine and everything in between.
The wines I'm particularly drawn to at Pale Ruby Wine tend to combine skin contact with low-intervention winemaking, because I love the way this can amplify the sense of place and individuality in these wines.
What should you eat with orange wine?
This is where orange wine really shines. The combination of acidity, texture and gentle tannin makes it much more food-friendly than you might expect.
Try it with:
Greek mezze and dips
Grilled vegetables
Fried dishes
Roast chicken
Spiced dishes
Hard and semi-hard cheeses
Seafood with strong herbs or spices
Mediterranean dishes with olive oil and garlic
And don't be afraid to serve it slightly chilled - particularly the fresher styles.
How should you serve orange wine?
I'd generally serve orange wine cool rather than ice cold.
Around 10-13°C is a good starting point, depending on the style. Lighter examples can take a little more chilling, while fuller, more tannic wines benefit from being served slightly warmer so their texture and aromas can open up.
And unlike a very delicate white, many orange wines benefit from being opened a little before drinking.
If the wine is cloudy or has sediment, that's not necessarily a fault - particularly with unfined and unfiltered natural wines.
Ready to try orange wine?
If you're curious about orange wine but don't know where to start, we currently have two very different Greek examples:
The Knack Project Deus Ex Machina Orange Assyrtiko - bold, deeply textured and naturally made in Attica.
Papadopoulos Orange Assyrtiko - a mountain expression from Rapsani on the slopes of Mount Olympus.
They're both made from Assyrtiko, but they're very different wines - which is precisely the point.
And if you're curious about minimal intervention wines, check out our Greek Natural Wine Case.
One grape. Two regions. Two producers. Two completely different expressions. And that's what makes exploring Greek wine so much fun.
