Orange (Amber) Wine

The daughter went to an up market Italian restaurant in Brooklyn (NY) the other night and suggested I look at the wine menu.
Two things stood out.
One was the very large selection of wine, all of which was available by the glass.
This is highly unusual with most wine by the glass limited to a few selections.
I wondered how they kept potentially so many open bottles fresh for any length of time. Most wine starts to deteriorate within days, even when kept under optimal conditions.
There are numerous products on the market that purport to be able to do this from the humble air extractor pump (which is useless) to some really sophisticated equipment.
At the top end are products like the Coravin.

This tool works by pushing a long hollow needle through the unopened bottle’s cork.
At the push of a button wine is drawn out through the needle and argon gas is pushed into the bottle from a compressed canister inside the device.
Trials have shown that wine stays in great condition for two weeks or more.
But there are some drawbacks. It’s a bit fiddly, it only works on corked bottles not screw caps and it is expensive at around $A450 although a business probably wouldn’t shy at that price.
The other surprise on the menu was the large selection of Orange wines.
For this Australian, it immediately meant wines from the Orange Wine Region of New South Wales but knew this would be highly unlikely for a USA restaurant.
And it couldn’t be citrus wine.
So a bit of investigation established that Orange (or amber) wine is white wine made by the same process as red wine.
Instead of crushing the grapes and separating the juice from the skins before fermentation, which is normal for white wine production, the juice is fermented on the skins and left to macerate on them for an extended length of time.

 



















As a result orange wines are more tannic and very flavourful having extracted tannins and phenols from the skins. They also have a mouth feel closer to that of red rather than white wine.
Certainly the colour is quite different being between deep rouge and honey. And they are not too difficult to match with food.
How I could have missed knowing about this style over so many decades is a bit embarrassing. They have been around for many thousands of years originating probably in Georgia (the country, not the USA state). Many Australian producers have started to embrace this style and local restaurant menus are beginning to have a few offerings.
However the best come from the border region between Italy and Slovenia.