Lagar de Costa Albariño Natural, Rías Baixas, Spain 2021 (£21, botteapostle.com; shrinetothevine.co.uk) There is something absolutely in tune with the season about orange wines, a relatively new category in wine shops (or, more accurately, since they are based on the revival of an ancient tradition of making wine, a “new-old” category). That’s partly to do with the colour: wherever they sit on the spectrum from light gold to full amber, to use the palette swatch adopted by the UK’s premier importer of orange wines Les Caves de Pyrene, they are reminiscent of a shade of leaf in an autumnal wood. But the orange-autumn connection is also about the range of flavours and textures you’ll find in orange wines, which often have something of the orchard about them: even if the wines don’t taste of apple, pear, quince or stone fruit (as they often do), they usually have a Cox’s apple’s tang and tannic chew, as is the case with Galician producer Lagar de Costa’s gorgeous interpretation, which also adds a wash of pithy citrus and salty minerals to the mix.
Fabien Jouves Skin Contact, France 2020 (from £28, brettshop.co.uk; corkandcask.co.uk) Orange wines are effectively white wines in that they are made from white grapes but, rather than separating the juice from skins before fermentation, winemakers choose to let the wine spend weeks or months macerating on the skins. This gives orange wines their red-wine like tannin, as well as the panoply of spice, nut, and dried herb and flower, even hoppy notes that fans of the style (and I include myself in that club) find so appealing. How long to macerate is very much up to the winemaker: the brother-and-sister team behind Lagar de Costa give their albariño grapes several weeks of maceration, for example. Fabien Jouves, who makes a range of superb natural-leaning wines (red, white and orange) in the Cahors region of south west France, gives his blend of local grapes ugni blanc, gros manseng and muscat d’Alexandre, three months to bring the flavours of dried and fresh tropical fruit and nippy tannin to his wonderful Skin Contact, which was lovely in 2020 and still better in the 2021 about to come to market.
Macerao Naranjo Orange Wine, Itata, Chile 2021 (£8.99, Waitrose) The modern orange wine trend has its roots in northeastern Italy and the OG modern master of the style Josko Gravner, who looked to old ways of making wine with the skins in traditional clay amphorae. The fashion has spread throughout the world, and recent favourites of mine stretch from Dario Princic in Friuli to Menexes in Crete and Domaine Bohn in Alsace. Gravner himself was inspired by the amphora tradition in Georgia and Armenia, and Georgia’s modern clay-winemaking scene is the source of many of the best contemporary orange wines. A superb and (for a style that isn’t always the easiest to source or cheapest to buy) relatively accessible introduction to the Georgian qvevri style, in which the wine is both macerated and fermented on the skins in traditional buried clay pots known as qvevri, I was very impressed by the relatively pale-coloured and elegant but intensely flavoured Qvevris Kisi Orange Wine 2021 (£14.99, in 40 Waitrose stores from November). In the meantime, the same retailer has the delightfully floral, gently grippy Chilean Macerao.
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