Orange Wine Has Become Wine’s Marmite

The first time someone brought a bottle of orange wine to my house, I nearly threw him out along with it. There are practical jokes, and then there is turning up at a man’s front door clutching a bottle of wine the colour of Lucozade and insisting everyone drinks it.

I assumed he was taking the mickey. He was not. After several minutes of him patiently explaining that yes, orange wine was real, no, it wasn’t made from oranges, and yes, people were apparently drinking this voluntarily, we opened it. And it was… fine. Not terrible, not remarkable, and certainly not memorable enough for me to photograph the label, which tells you plenty, because I photograph practically every bottle that genuinely interests me. I couldn’t name that wine today if you offered me a reward.

What I do remember is thinking the whole thing felt like one of those wine-world inventions that exist mainly so the person who ordered it can spend ten minutes explaining it to everybody else. And then something inconvenient happened. The wines got better. Or I got better at finding them. Probably both. Orange wine stopped being whispered about by the one person at dinner who had just discovered natural wine, and started turning up on serious lists, in sommelier recommendations, in supermarket aisles, in the hands of celebrities. And, inevitably, people started getting angry about it. Which is the single clearest sign that a thing has actually made it.

That is the whole story of orange wine in one mouthful. It can be textured, savoury, aromatic, strange and genuinely brilliant with food. It can also taste as though someone fermented apricots inside an old hiking boot. The truly maddening part is that both of those bottles get filed under exactly the same word on the list. Orange wine, in other words, has become wine’s Marmite.

Let’s get the necessary sentence out of the way before Google starts fidgeting. Orange wine is white wine made with extended contact between the juice and the grape skins. Normally white wine is whisked away from its skins fairly promptly, like a toddler from a puddle. With orange wine, the skins are left to steep during fermentation, sometimes for days, sometimes for months, and they hand over colour, tannin, texture and flavour as they go. The result runs from pale gold through copper and amber to full traffic-cone, depending on the grapes and the winemaker’s nerve.

So, in the only terms anyone needs: white grapes, made a bit more like red wine, equals orange wine. No oranges. No orange juice. No cheeky slice of Valencia bobbing about in the glass. Everyone can relax and put the fruit bowl down.

Here is my favourite thing about orange wine: it manages to be both wildly fashionable and staggeringly old. Georgia has been making wine for thousands of years in qvevri, big clay vessels buried in the ground, fermenting white grapes on their skins, pips and sometimes stems to produce the amber wines it is rightly proud of. Traditional Georgian qvevri winemaking was recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage back in 2013. TikTok, then, did not invent orange wine. Georgia beat it to the punch by roughly several thousand years.

What is genuinely new is the phrase. Decanter traces the term “orange wine” to British importer David Harvey, who coined it in 2004 while working in Frank Cornelissen’s cellar in Sicily. Sit with that for a second. The technique predates most of civilisation. The branding is younger than the iPod. The method is ancient; the name is basically a millennial with a canvas tote bag.

If Georgia is the ancient story, Josko Gravner and Stanko Radikon are how skin-contact white wine muscled its way into modern wine culture. Working around Oslavia on the Italian-Slovenian border, they and others, Dario Princic among them, revived long skin contact and lower-intervention white winemaking and became enormously influential. Gravner got so deep into it he visited Georgia and started burying qvevri in Italy. Decanter now files both men among the seminal names of the movement.

These were not men round a marketing table asking what millennials needed and answering “brown Pinot Grigio.” They were seriously questioning how white wine ought to be made, using skin contact to change structure and texture rather than to look good on a shelf. And from those fairly earnest beginnings came something none of them can have entirely intended: orange wine got cool.

For years orange wine lived in the corner of the wine world reserved for people who can say Rkatsiteli without visibly bracing. Then it escaped. Natural-wine bars took it in. Sommeliers started pushing it. Bottle shops gave it its own shelf. People who couldn’t tell Barolo from Brunello began confidently asking for “something skin-contact,” and “orange” quietly became a real heading on the list rather than a mild ambush arriving at the table.

Even the grandees relented. Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine now gives orange wine its own entry, a dry, tannic, white-grape style tangled up with the natural-wine movement, and reviews it alongside white, red, rosé and sparkling like any other citizen. When the establishment starts filing you under your own heading, you have officially graduated from fad. Restaurants did the heavy lifting: Michelin’s 2026 London wine-list guide cheerfully notes lists spanning rare Old World bottles and modern natural ones, and once you’ve seen orange wine on enough menus and ordered it enough times, it stops sounding like something Del Boy knocked up in his garage.

This is where it gets funny. Ask wine professionals what you should drink more of and plenty will happily steer you toward skin-contact oddities. Ask a different group what they’d like taken out and shot, and orange wine turns up on that list too. In January 2026 VinePair asked 17 sommeliers which wine-list trends they wanted gone; nestled among unstable natural wine, over-oaked Cabernet and pét-nat sat orange wine. A week later another VinePair survey had a somm cheerfully championing it and welcoming its move into the mainstream.

So the official professional position is, and I quote both of them: “please drink this” and “please make it stop.” Somewhere between those two sits the actual truth of orange wine in 2026, which is the most wine-world outcome imaginable.

And then came the surest proof of all that orange wine has arrived. In October 2025, Vanity Fair ran a piece titled, with no hedging whatsoever, “The Case Against Orange Wine.” Not “Is Orange Wine A Bit Much?” Not “Perhaps We Have Slightly Too Much Orange Wine.” The case against it, like a prosecution. It went after the movement’s worst habits: faults sold as authenticity, oxidation rebranded as a virtue, instability treated as character, and the faint air of religion around anything low-intervention.

Orange wine had reached the final cultural milestone. People were no longer merely drinking it. They were writing furious essays demanding its abolition. And the genuinely awkward part is that some of the criticism lands.

There was a stretch, and there are still bottles, where orange wine got a pass no conventional wine would ever be granted. Oxidised became “complex.” Volatile became “alive.” Smells faintly like a farm animal has just left the room became “terroir.” No. Bad wine is still bad wine. A wine is not automatically interesting because it is cloudy, cidery and wearing a label with a hand-drawn badger on it.

Happily, this is exactly where the category has improved most since that forgettable bottle turned up at my door. The best orange wines I meet now don’t taste like experiments; they taste like wine. Still challenging, still tannic, still full of that tea-leaf, dried-fruit, herbal, nutty character, but with precision, fruit and freshness underneath it. The point is no longer simply that the wine is orange. Thank God.

Asking what orange wine tastes like is like asking what red wine tastes like. Which one? A lightly skin-contact Pinot Gris can be fresh, floral and barely-there. A deeply macerated Georgian amber can be tannic, herbal and structurally closer to a red than to the Sauvignon Blanc sulking beside it. Expect some combination of apricot, peach skin, orange peel, dried citrus, tea, herbs, honey, nuts and spice, and, crucially, tannin.

That last one is what ambushes first-timers. We file tannin under red wine because it mostly comes from skins, pips and stems, so leave white juice sitting on its skins and your innocent white grape suddenly develops grip. That can be a revelation. It can also feel like your gums have lost an argument with a teabag. Which is precisely why treating “orange wine” as one flavour is nonsense: there are gentle bottles I’d pour for a white-Burgundy drinker without a second thought, and others I’d only serve after checking the guest had completed some form of survival training.

This one deserves shouting, because the two get treated as synonyms constantly. Orange wine is a technique. Natural wine is a whole sprawling philosophy that doesn’t even have a single legal definition to its name. An orange wine can be natural, and plenty are, but it doesn’t have to be; a winemaker can use skin contact and still make the thing conventionally. Equally a natural wine can be white, red, rosé, sparkling or orange. Even qvevri isn’t a guarantee: WSET points out that qvevri wines can be conventional, organic, biodynamic or natural, because the pot doesn’t dictate the politics. Orange, natural, qvevri, amphora, skin-contact: these overlap, they are not the same word, and knowing the difference will save you a solid fifteen minutes next time someone corners you at a party.

And then orange wine got itself an Oscar winner. In 2025 Regina King launched MianU, opening with an orange-hued skin-contact blend of Gewürztraminer and Chardonnay. This one has a real reason to exist, unlike most celebrity booze: King created it in memory of her late son Ian, whose love of “funky wine” inspired the project, and the first release sold out fast, followed by a limited Syrah.

What I find telling is the choice of drink. Celebrity alcohol is not news. Tequila? Take a ticket. Rosé? Join the queue. Gin? Someone’s launched three in the time it took you to read this sentence. But orange wine is a decision, and it says everything about where the category now sits. You can put out a celebrity orange wine and reasonably assume people know what it is. Ten years ago half the campaign budget would have gone on explaining that no citrus was harmed in the making.

Here is another sign this supposedly fringe thing is nothing of the sort: the Drinks Business is running its third Global Orange Wine Masters in 2026, judging skin-contact wines as their own competitive category. Dull institutional developments often tell you more than viral videos ever will. Once competitions, retailers, restaurants and professional bodies start treating something as its own category, you have moved well past “here’s the weird wine my mate found.” There are now producers, critics, collectors, specialist shops, restaurants, competitions and people yelling about it online. Welcome, orange wine, to wine.

Is orange wine sweet?

Usually no. The colour has nothing to do with sugar. Most orange wines are dry; it’s just that notes of dried apricot, honey and candied peel can hint at sweetness even when there’s barely any there, and the tannin makes the whole experience feel unlike a normal white. If you hate sweet wine, don’t flee on sight. If you hate tannin, funk and being made to think while you drink, approach with a little caution.

Should orange wine be chilled?

Yes, but don’t drown it in an ice bucket. Fierce cold flattens the aroma and sharpens the tannin, which is the opposite of what a serious skin-contact wine wants. Lighter styles are happy served cool, like a fuller white; bigger, heavily macerated bottles usually prefer a touch warmer. And if the thing keeps unfurling after twenty minutes in the glass, leave it be. Wine does not turn to poison at 13 degrees.

One reason sommeliers keep the faith even as some drinkers recoil is food. Orange wine occupies a genuinely useful middle ground: the acidity and freshness of a white with some of the grip and structure of a red, which makes it a menace for all the right reasons at the difficult end of the table. JancisRobinson.com’s pairing coverage rates orange and amber wines for handling the awkward squad: pickles, garlic, spice, rich dishes and both plants and proteins.

Think Indian, Middle Eastern and, obviously, Georgian food; fermented things, hard cheese, charred vegetables, mushrooms, rich poultry, pork, spiced seafood. Basically every dish where a delicate Sauvignon Blanc takes one look, bursts into tears and runs from the room. Orange wine has enough about it to stay in the fight.

Georgia

The spiritual home. Look for indigenous grapes such as Rkatsiteli, Kisi and Mtsvane, often made traditionally in qvevri: serious, tannic, savoury and a world away from conventional European white. If your only orange wine so far has been the pale, easy supermarket kind, a proper Georgian amber may make you wonder whether you’ve been drinking the same category at all.

Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy

The engine room of the modern revival: Gravner, Radikon, Dario Princic, Vodopivec, Skerk. Names worth learning if you want to see what skin contact becomes when it’s treated as serious wine rather than a novelty act.

Slovenia

Western Slovenia in particular sits right alongside Friuli, and the border matters far less to the wine than it does to the governments. Long traditions here of working with varieties built for extended skin contact.

Austria, France and the US

Austria’s natural and biodynamic scene turns out beautifully precise skin-contact wines with enough acidity to stay light on their feet. France’s low-intervention crowd has spread it through Alsace, the Loire and beyond. And America has been, in Jancis Robinson’s phrase, turning orange for well over a decade. The category is no longer geographically niche, which is exciting and slightly dangerous, because the word “orange” on a label tells you almost nothing about whether you’ll love what’s inside.

Ignore the colour first. Then ask about skin-contact time, the grape, and where it’s from, and whether you’re looking at a light maceration or something deeply structured. Most importantly, tell whoever’s selling it what you actually like. If you’re a Sauvignon drinker after something interesting, don’t let anyone send you home with an uncompromising six-month qvevri monster and then decide orange wine is disgusting. Equally, if you’re a Nebbiolo drinker chasing tannin and weirdness, a pretty, pale Pinot Gris with four days on skins will leave you wondering what the fuss was about.

Think of it as a sliding scale. Light skin contact: fresher, aromatic, approachable. Medium: more texture, spice and noticeable grip. Long: deep colour, serious tannin, savoury complexity, proper structure. There are enormous exceptions, obviously. Wine adores an exception. It’s how wine writers stay employed.

I think it is, and I think we’ve also got better at finding the good stuff. When something is tiny and experimental you get a disproportionate dose of the experiments. As a category grows up, the good producers survive, importers get fussier, restaurants learn what sells, somms work out how to introduce it properly, and drinkers stop being impressed simply because a thing is odd, the same trap as assuming a pricier bottle automatically tastes better. “Orange” is no longer enough on its own, and that is thoroughly healthy. The novelty era is ending; the quality era is starting. At least I hope so, because I have had quite enough wines described to me as “challenging.” I have children. I do not need my drinks to provide additional challenges.

Which is why I actually enjoyed the backlash. If everyone agrees a category is wonderful, nobody ever checks. Orange wine needed sceptics asking whether a given bottle is genuinely brilliant or merely applauded for tasting peculiar. It needed sommeliers losing patience with faulty wine, drinkers losing their awe of the word “natural,” and serious producers proving that skin contact is a tool, not an ideology. Frankly, it needed to stop being cool. Cool is exhausting. Good is far more sustainable.

Written by Vim, Editor of 12×75.