There’s no doubt that orange wines are having a moment, but being trendy is not the same thing as being new.
At its simplest, orange wine is a white wine made like a red, and creating one begins when grapes arrive at the winery.
(Watching grapes being transferred from large harvest bins into the press is mesmerizing, as long as you don’t mind being in close contact with lots of bees.)
“The main difference between a white wine fermentation and a red wine fermentation is that white varieties go directly into the press,” said Jean-Benoit Deslaurier, chief winemaker for Benjamin Bridge. “Whether they’re destemmed on the way to the press or put in whole cluster, the juice is released immediately, so there is very minimal skin contact at pressing. On the other hand, with red wine, the opposite happens - it’s pressed much later, after the alcoholic fermentation is complete.”
A recent trip to a seldom-visited corner of our cellar led to the discovery of small quantities of two orange wines that had been quietly aging, to be honest, forgotten.
Deslaurier opened bottles of each and declared them ready to drink.
“I think orange wines aren’t necessarily challenging to make,” he said, choosing “lean” and “astringent” as descriptors for the 2015 Riesling/Geisenheim and the 2021 Basket Blend. “They’re challenging to the traditional palate. Because there is a subjectivity in our definition of quality, and orange wines are so different from what people expect from a white wine, I would call them an acquired taste, where some people actually end up preferring them, because they’re a lot more eventful.”
Happy to have a chance to geek out a bit, Deslauriers explained that orange wines contain tannins that whites typically don’t, because the grape skins remain present during fermentation.
“And in those grape skins are phenolic compounds, with tannins being the main one,” he said. “Tannins are what give red wines their structure and astringency. They act as antioxidants, bringing a small element of bitterness and that drying sensation on the palate. Normally people don’t associate white wines with that degree of phenolic presence.”
While orange wines may feel fashionable, their origins are ancient.
“If you go back to antiquity, to essentially the cradle of wine itself, you find practices where grape skins were included in underground fermentation vats,” Deslaurier said. “You saw those practices in Rome, Georgia, and Greece. It was much later, through Burgundy and eventually Champagne, that white wines began to be fermented away from the skins. This trend is really a return to wine’s earliest chapters.
The acidity present in the terroir of the Gaspereau Valley works in concert with tannins and phenolics to help orange wines remain vibrant and fresh over time.
“And you see that in this 2015 Riesling/Geisenheim, which aromatically is still very much on top of its game,” said Deslaurier. “There is no sense of oxidation, just a clear imprint of skin contact, and it is still a very useful wine. With the ’21 Basket Blend, you get that phenolic, herbaceous note on both the nose and the palate. It doesn’t have quite the same acidity as the 2015, but that’s typical of Nova Scotia wines - the further back you go, the higher the acidity tends to be.”
