This is the second part of a 6-part series about time travel, wine histories, and the fall/winter 2025 club shipment. Read part 1: Chablis, or “minerality.”

Hi folks,

While sitting down to write this over the weekend, I made the fatal mistake of taking a dip into internet orange wine discourse. I supped the poison ichor. I read the comments. I did the opposite of touching grass!

Instead, for hours, I found myself floating in decade-old forum threads littered with dead links, the defunct twitter accounts of disappeared “wine satire” blogs, and the menu of the 2009 orange wine tasting Levi Dalton hosted at Convivio, a Michael White restaurant in Midtown East that closed during the final Bloomberg mayoralty.²

(NYT critic Eric Asimov was there: “One of the most fascinating and doubtless one of the geekiest wine tastings it’s ever been my pleasure to attend.” His favorites, if you’re curious, included a 2007 Coenobium ‘Rusticum’ and an ‘03 Radikon Jakot.)

From 2009’s niche fascination and obscurity, the tenor of what was on offer quickly curdled.

It’s 2013. Then–master sommelier Richard Betts is writing a column in Forbes right after publishing The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert (and starting his tequila brand): “Yup, we might be right about there — that place where we’re kicking a dead horse. And that would be cool, because then it would be truly over. I think that Ron Washam, who writes the funniest wine blog¹ over at HoseMaster of Wine, said it best: ‘There was a lot of talk about orange wine in 2012, but I don’t know a single person who likes them. Orange wines are the Kardashians of wine. Please, just quietly die.’”

Reader, they did not.

It’s 2019. A television and culture columnist at the New Yorker writes (fact-checked, presumably!) that orange wine has become “a trend, a movement, a totem of correct taste” and moved “from a novelty act to a regular character.” (He is not a fan.)

Over at the Wall Street Journal, the consistently terrible Lettie Teague goes to suburban New Jersey to file her favorite type of piece, a safari-style column in which she dislikes almost everything she tastes. “Otherwise known as skin-contact wine,” reads the subhed, “this trendy style blew up a few years ago — but left our wine columnist cold.”

It’s last month, October 2025. Byron Houdayer, a 39 year-old French–German former London hedge fund manager married into a cadet branch of the defunct royal house of Bavaria, writes his second column for Vanity Fair, “The Case Against Orange Wine.”

The piece sees him barely able to keep his pince-nez from falling out. In a very lightly-edited 500 words, orange wine is ‘curdled’, ‘cultish’, ‘redolent of … regret’, ‘a low-sulfite con’, a ‘student prank,’ a ‘roulette wheel', ‘curated anarchy,’ ‘unwashed radish water,’ ‘the sensory equivalent of a slap,’ its existence evidence of ‘a collapsed scaffolding of taste’ and a rebuke to the ‘exquisite tyranny of tradition’.

It would be a mistake to respond earnestly to any of the particulars. (For one thing, it sounds exhausting. Why does writing about wine have to be so embarassing?)

Instead, let’s do some meta analysis. What do people say orange wine is, especially when they’re mounting up to tilt at it?

These pieces generally end up making similar gestures. There’s a little hipster-bashing in whatever flavor is au courant, some evocative language for how bad the wine tastes, a potted history of the style, a concession two-thirds of the way through that some of it is good, actually, but it’s the movement that is irritating, or harmful, or whatever, and some kind of kicker. ⁴

This limited move set, though, reveals some incremental progression.

Early on, we’re much more constrained regionally: this a style mostly about Italy and borderland Slovenia. Tannic extraction is massive, one of the “this tastes bad” tentpoles is “oxidation,” and flor-aged wines like Jura’s vin jaune or sherry are sometimes thrown into the pot. “Natural wine” isn’t yet being used in mainstream print. Georgia has only just been invaded by Russia and its exports to the largest market for its wines embargoed; the qvevri wine renaissance has barely begun. The knock would be that it’s hopelessly esoteric, not trendy.

As Georgian qvevri wines become available Stateside and the Georgians storm the Paris natural wine bar scene, some version of the Caucuses, amphora, and “thousands of years of tradition” will be folded in to the potted history along with gestures towards the “Italy / Slovenia” of it all. (The first large-scale tasting I went to of these newly-arrived qvevri wines that really knocked my socks off was at Contra in the summer of 2016, before we opened Rouge Tomate.³)

By our 2019 pieces, the style’s place in the culture (at least, at the [ominous music plays] New York City wine bar) is assured, undeniable. There are jokes on network television. Alternative terms — skin contact, macerated white — get batted around. (In other words, the assumption is that the term is well-known enough that some definitional nuance can be deployed.) Orange wine and the now-ascendent natural wine movement are often treated interchangeably. Style criticism starts to have less to do with oxidation and more to do with vinegar-kombucha volatility, bacterial flaws, and sulfur, or the lack thereof.

And now?

Past peak trend, reaction is the order of the day. “Orange Wine (TM)”, is much more likely to be juicy, easy-drinking, and in a clear glass bottle than it is to be a foreboding wall of extraction and long elevage. The Gulp Hablo-fication of the category continues to peel it away from both the natural wine movement and the kinds of old-school, Gravner/Radikon wines that defined the style a decade and a half ago. Even the haters are drinking wine with maceration, although to them, it’s probably just white wine. “Orange” is the color of the macerated wines they don’t like.

Coming up for air after all of this, here’s one way of thinking about ‘orange’ that’s a little bit more practical: it’s simply useful to macerate!

Skin contact helps along strong native yeast fermentations (lot of yeast population on skins). I remember talking to a grower who was in the process of converting a new parcel to organics and having trouble with stuck ferments in his white wines (this often happens when you’re weaning vines and soils off of chemical intervention — things can get worse before they get better). His solution was to put in a portion of the press skins with the juice to push it over the finish line.

Once your fermentation’s over, the tannic structure skins and/or stems provide helps preserve wine, too. Press juice is fragile and delicate. Maceration is one way for your wine to strap on a little bit of armor.

As for those forbiddingly tannic orange wines of the early aughts, they remind me a little bit of the approach to extraction and elevage you see in Bordeaux or old-school Barolo: dried out, long macerations, exposure to air.

If orange winemaking is just red winemaking with gold grapes, it shouldn’t be any surprise that there’s a range of potential structural shapes and weights, from the dense and architectural all the way out to rosé and infusion Burgundy and cerasuolo d’Abruzzo and carbonic Beaujolais — and that as more different people from more different places farming more different varieties play with maceration, we have a lot more to choose from.

In one way of looking at things, almost every wine made with white grapes before the ‘50s would have been somewhere on that skin contact spectrum: foot-stomped, basket-pressed, settled clear over time in cask or clay.

Whether it had deep color would vary, but white wine the way you’re picturing white wine — crystalline, crisp, fruity, bottled fresh in the spring after harvest — was largely invented post-World War II. That’s why when Stanko Radikon starts experimenting with long macerations of his white grapes in Oslavje in the mid-90s, he describes it making wine “like my grandfather made it in the ‘30s.”

Let’s get in the weeds a little bit. Here are the tools in your toolkit for making crystal-clear white wine a la Gallo Chablis Blanc, late ‘70s pinot grigio, the albariño that’s about to get planted by the thousands of hectares in Rías Baixas in the ‘80s, etc:

It’s not that there’s no white-ish wine before [insert whatever historical event in 1962 you think is the most evocative⁵], but it would have been rare, taken patience, involved reductive aging on gross lees and regular topping-up — and even then it probably would have had a little tinge of copper or onionskin.

In other words, we don’t need to go all the way back to Georgian amber wine and our 8,000 year-old evidence of the birth of winemaking. (We’ll be doing that next time!)

Instead, we can go to a place that’s become famous for just the kind of fresh whites that only became possible post-Ringo, a place where, just like in Oslavje, people's grandparents were making their whites by foot-trodding them in lagares before pressing and aging:

Rías Baixes, in Spain’s green, mild, gallego northwest, with its granite standing stones and traditional bagpipe playing and empanadas the size of dinner plates stuffed with squid.

We’ll taste albariño fermented on the skins a 4-minute bike ride from the Atlantic Ocean by a multigenerational family of growers who stopped using the D.O. label back in 2010 — exactly the bottle, in fact, that I opened earlier last month in a class exploring “typicity”, appellation law, and how commercial wine styles shape our vision of what’s normal for regions and grapes.

I didn’t get around to it in these 2000 words, but a lot of the early orange wine writing expresses a lot of confusion over what kind of food, exactly, these wines are for.

In my experience, they couldn’t be more versatile or useful. Macerated whites are so often the key to ingredients and flavors that classic wine pairing brain has a really hard time with: pickled things, chili paste, spice of all kinds, vinegar-based marinades, vegetables. As is so often the case (we’re going to talk a lot about this when we get to hybrids!), orange was a doorway into wine for all sorts of people who didn’t feel like wine was something that belonged to them, or that they could access.

We’re lucky the people writing thinkpieces for the last decade and change failed to get the wine world they’d hoped for.

<3,
grape kid