"A bottle of white, a bottle of red. Perhaps a bottle of rosé instead," sang Billy Joel in Scenes from an Italian Restaurant. They may not be the finest lyrics ever written, but he did manage to cover the entire spectrum of known wines in just two lines. Or did he?
What about orange wines? Surely, if he were really hip he wouldn’t have skipped the latest craze in winemaking. Then again, beyond the buzz of wine bloggers, some of whom talk of little else, not everyone has heard of them.
To explain, orange wines are made from white grapes fermented in their skins for days, weeks and sometimes months as though they were red wines. With whites the juice is separated straight after crushing, while rosés traditionally use black grapes and a few hours of skin contact to bleed in the colour.
Orange wines are controversial as proved the other night at an Italian food and wine evening at Edinburgh’s Suburban Pantry. When Neil Robertson, of Wood Winters, poured out a Tuscan trebbiano the colour of Irn-Bru, he split the room down the middle. Half the guests winced as though swallowing curdled milk or cod-liver oil, while the other half seemed to like it. No one sat on the fence.
For me, it was OK on its own, but surprisingly good with the food – a wedge of gorgonzola and pear wrapped in prosciutto. Orange wines are notoriously inconsistent and you don’t have to look far to find bad winemaking dressing its faults as virtues. "Man, that’s not oxidised, it’s just natural," is the sort of excuse producers peddling a rusty concoction allegedly made from grapes like to use.
One of the pioneers of orange wine is Josko Gravner in Friuli in northeast Italy who became disenchanted with making squeaky-clean, modern wines in stainless steel tanks. So the tanks were sold off and replaced with clay amphorae smuggled in from Georgia. They are buried in the ground up to their necks, filled with juice and skins, and then left in peace for Mother Nature to work her magic.
The first vintage in 2001 was released many years later, by which point Gravner was being ridiculed and dismissed as a crank. But he persevered and today his wines enjoy a real cult following. I have tried them once, and I have to say I did struggle a bit.
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