Orange Wine

just a quick heads up this episode of talking of wine was recorded away from our usual setup so apologies for the slight discrepancy in sound quality in lieu of the subject we're going to be approaching today my phone downstairs charging my solar panel how very pretty love you well I know I thought well see how it goes given that we're going to be up here for about an hour or so yeah and so there we go so welcome listen to back to talking of wine today list this is what's that yeah we've been doing a little tour of niche wine areas champagne port Madira anyway my brother-in-law is over from Canada and and it's not just on this podcast that we talk of wine I talk about wine with other people and one of these people was my cousin my brother-in-law Christian so shout out to him he'll be back home in Nova Scotia now and to the rest of my Nova Scotia family a place of good wine reputed very much so yeah and up and up as they say so we were talking the other like we sort of stumbled across orange wine yeah and I thought you know what that's quite a cool subject because it will cross over into areas I mean obviously listen this is going to be back into Joe Wodseck and court but I imagine that Joe will treat us to a few snippets of biodynamic organic moon shine and all that kind of jazz and I just thought it was quite an interesting topic it's not something I know too too much about in detail but I do know that it's a fashion that has become more and more popular recently over the last well 12 months really possibly two years so Joe what can you tell us about orange wine well this is this is an appetite because I've just been to a tasting in Bristol where we had lots of very enthusiastic customers come to various tables of which I was representing one of them from a Bristolian friend of mine Philip Cox who indeed owns a very very large wine in Romania and he has a wine called orange wine and it was very very popular on a day you have a lot of you walking around take off can we try orange wine and but then when you explore a bit further there is this and nobody really knows what orange wine is actually it's extremely easy to explain there's two sides orange wine what it technically is which I'll explain very simply in a moment and also what it is in spirit which is why you do it initially right technically when you make red wine for those from the don't know the vast vast vast majority let's say with the exception of I would say two I can think of all red wine red grapes have white juice I think we've covered this off before but when you squeeze a red grape white juice comes out 70% of orange champagne is made entirely from red grape and it's still a white wine and of course if you want to make a wine red you put the grape skins in with the wines the sugar turns to alcohol in the back of the alcohol which is a cleansing obliteration starts to extract color from the skin so after 24 hours 48 hours you've got a rosé after three weeks you've got a red now if you do that entire process but use white grapes not red grape you end up with the one that's orange not red it's a white wine that's made like a red similar to what we more technically call them our skin contact where unusually with white wines you don't leave the skin the white but in this case you have so what it does it creates this kind of liminal space between white and red where you've got a white wine with red wine tanning and it becomes it's another fascinating style of wine and it's there's really no reason why we shouldn't have it to start with all wine was like that and if we look at exciting areas of explanation more recently now we've gone back to wines from Eastern Europe places like Georgia where they have these wines called Kfevri Rines these wines are made precisely like that and there are wines we made today exactly as they would have been made five six seven millennia ago and that's one orange wine it basically the other things important is that white grape varieties were quite rare over a thousand years ago and they're quite recent mutation for example in Bordeaux there was no white wine in Bordeaux of any kind until about the 1600 when the Sauvignon Blanc appeared as a mutation so it's important to remember that orange wine and red wine were the same thing back in the day you know some wines were slightly pale on the other side it didn't really discriminate between a wine that had different color they all ended up orange or brown or red anyway this is very interesting because I think there's a slight I can forgive myself slightly there seems to be a slight crossover because I have to say I thought that orange wine was a progression of the trends of organic bio dynamic which as it happens is also a regression into how wines have been made for centuries but because of technology we've moved further down one avenue I suppose and so organic and biodynamic are a sort of a reshifting back to the older ways but with perhaps a little bit more precision I thought that orange wine was the the ultimate I thought it was pushing the biodynamic barrier to the limit of this is how they used to make wine and I couldn't understand why they did it because I thought well surely that just makes the whole process more expensive and it's not necessary but this is complete news to me that orange wine is actually red white wine which is fascinating you've you've enabled me to seamlessly segue into the second half of that proposal at the beginning which is why do they do it and this is more in what you've just said it so you have those people I think they tend to have man buns sleeves to tattoos and probably eat breakfast and east London out of a tiny little wheelbarrow we're of course talking about the hipster now the hipster is very much in love with your wine and if you go to a wine bar in the eastern or in Bethnal Green or somewhere in the eastern and very very trendy London you'll find that a lot of wines and a lot of wine bars are indeed of this ill they have a very long list of orange wines and as described natural wine and there's a massive crossover between the two if you're not going to do anything for wine if you're going to allow wine to create itself as god intended to use just to paraphrase it in the same way that you make cheese for example because to make great cheese there's very little manipulation just allow it to curdle in its own wonderful way and depending where you are in the world and with very little intervention you end up with different kinds of cheese and of course there's no way you are in the world if you really want to show a real expression of place then you don't want to manipulate the juice and the wine too much while it's being made because that shows much more of that expression and I think the orange wines are as you say an extreme attempt of non-intervention wine making so so in the spirit of it almost all of it is organic all of all of it is biodynamic almost all of it is treated very very little influence if you like wild yeasts, spontaneous fermentation and rather sadly in the quite large cases rather grotty wineries so orange wines can be quite challenging they can be very funky you can have all sorts of strange flavors and rumours which to the hips to food crowd into the orange wine lover it has been embraced but I find it very difficult to do such a new turn out because we've spent the last 300 years trying to make wine place cleaner and purer and prettier and now they're saying that's wrong we should have it walked in all take the bra off don't wear the antiplystrum then it hangs free exactly but I mean and they're all valid arguments I mean as I've mentioned before there's a cost to it so if you're prepared to pay that little bit extra then then why not but what you this revelation that you've afforded me is that if you think about orange wine as as you say a progression of white wine as you would red wine yeah why don't we have orange wines that are not organic or biodynamic that are made let's say in the in the same way is slightly cheaper red wines or or I say traditional bull row wines which are the dynamic on that by a dynamic organic is a very very tricky minefield but my point is can you find orange wines that aren't organic and by the number this is a very good point so this brings back to my last weekend in Bristol this gentleman Philip and his Australian wine maker hardly they were challenged by a lot of the bloody trendier wine pretending this country and I was there to take the seminar that he held in this wonderful city of Tim Meshwara West Romania and they said look we've got all these orange wines why don't you make an orange one why don't you give make your wines which at the moment you're supplying to the great the great the big suppliers like Majestic, Waitress, Tesco somebody sells to almost every multiple in the country if not all of them said but the wines are are made in a very modern way they're very technical there to a hipster maybe a little bit processed in some way so he said look I'll make use to my orange wine so he made an orange wine house of all varieties largely he was charred named so and he made 600,000 bottles and showed it to a few people who went oh well this is more like it this is delicious and he sold out in a matter of weeks and he's now made twice that much and I tried the 2024 orange wine last week and again it's absolutely delicious and what it is is bad wine cleaned up and a lot of orange wine isn't very in the conventional sense that it's poor wine making the people that really know what they're doing I'm afraid it's probably only around 10% but isn't that always the case around 10% of people are making orange wine in various areas of eastern Europe and France Germany very very popular Italy these wines if they're made well are delicious but actually they're a lot out there which are I mean to be very kind taste funky it faced yeah maybe Mike I think I think if I if I say the words microbial and maybe for our Americanist as funky you'll understand what I mean. Yeah, some of them like virgin on the fecal, they're not that at all, they're almost undrinkable. But there is something to be said about the natural antioxidant properties of the skin themselves, which allows someone, if they're very, very careful, now a nice healthy crop, and you'll grow your grapes not in a place full of wet and rotten dam, where of course these huge populations of pores and different organisms will be inclined to infect your white. If you're a summer, let's say like the Provence, the South of France, where it's bone dry, you've got wind every night, which keeps the vines very clean. You can make some very beautiful wines this way, without any intervention at all, but use wine to great texture. It adds tan into a white wine, so you're getting that extra layer of complexity that white wine doesn't have that red wine does have, and you can produce wines which are unbelievably delicious. And the other thing is that these wines, they're made in an oxidative style, none of these wines are made in stainless steel, trying to protect them from the outside, oxygen, nor to make impression fruity. They're very much more vindicent that they're allowed to progress further down the track. So when you're drinking orange wine, they don't tend to taste like a wine that was just made yesterday. They all have some evolution in them, and that oxidation actually keeps the main good stead going, keep forward, because I've opened bottles of orange wine and drunk them six days later, and they've tasted better, six days on, which is not something that conventional wine does. I was just about to ask, does that oxidation behave in the same way that Madeira does, and it gives it a resilience, or does it shorten it, and they say, well, it's oxidized to a point already, once you open it, it will oxidize more rapidly, and you're suggesting that if it's well done, it should add longevity. Quite right, Richard, you're a sharp cook, it's exactly that's exactly the reason why. Thanks very much. This has opened up a whole load of, as I said, it's revelatory, even for me, so I hope the list is finally as fascinating as I am. So you've mentioned a couple of things which I'd like to pick up on. The most recent one was the idea of aging a white wine once it's opened, not salaring it like an old burgundy, keeping it open. Now, the great proponent was Serge Hocka of Shatter Mewzai in Lebanon. He always suggested that he should open his bottles and leave them sometimes for several weeks. It was incredible. And he's also in that sort of climate where I'm wondering whether some of his white wines had a slight hint of orangeness. Had a slight orange hue to them. You might be surprised for that, because that moves on to my, you can clarify in a moment, but because it moves on also to the idea that orange wine it does seem to be a mix of fashion. It also seems to be a mix of progression from the organic biodynamic. But what I really love about it is the expression of history. And I love the fact that Eastern Europe, Georgia particularly, is finding, if you like, a new modern voice, ironically, using older techniques. And that leads to my third point for you, which is given the climate, given the need for a healthy climate and knowing what you're doing. An obvious place possibly for orange wine is New Zealand. Yes, yeah, absolutely. And it's not something that we currently see. But to ask those questions in order, first of all, Dosh Hocka of famous owner and wine maker and visionary of Shatter Mewzai in Lebanon in the Becker Valley, he almost, if you think about it, his white wines were never white. Well, they were always. And actually, I'm quite certain that all the time he was making his white wine, he always had, there was always some considerable skin contact, you know, which explains why I think they were very misunderstood and maligned earlier on. And I think Sir's always felt that his white wines in some ways were wines that should be drunk after the red, their wines are even more profound complexity. And like you said, wines that should be left open. And people couldn't really kind of get the head down. There are a lot of very good wines in the Lebanon, but a lot of them are very conventional. They're made made much more in the conventional sense of making Bordeaux wine. Dumbledore, great varieties to red, Bordeaux, they're Asian barrels like red, Bordeaux. It held the shadows that even are vanity projects and looking a little bit like shadows and Bordeaux and called shadows and called shadows. And Mewzai was, I think, all together, something which drew on the history of East European why making going back a long, long way. I mean, we at the moment we believe that Georgia was the first place where we found proper farming of grapes for the production of wine, but actually it looks highly likely that there's that it was, it'd been going on for way, way longer in the area of Lebanon, Syria, Iraq. It looks like Iraq, probably. If we actually, there's some fascinating times coming out at the moment with through forensics of looking at pots and stuff and seeing what was inside. The Iraq might have been making why 20,000 years. Well, as you said in our in our history, I don't, I never forget it was, it was a fantastic observation, which is it would be incredibly fortuitous if the vineyard in Georgia turned out to be the first one ever. You heard it exactly, right? It's like finding, but finding fossil, you know, it's an ongoing thing, right? So yes and yes. So Lebanese, those wines are particularly the wines of Mewzai in their own way were natural and they're an incredibly natural vibe. And there was no over-processing and over-production of wine in that area. He was the only one that so the wines were very, very clean and pure and as we move on forward to the present day, there needs to be a necessary intervention those wines more than they used to be because if you've got production of wine going on all around you, that will influence the the yeasts and the vineyard, the yeasts in your cellar and you're going to get more funk, more dissidents in your wine. I think with Mewzai now it's made slightly less natural than it was a while ago because they simply have to keep the wine in control up to a point. But in the old days where you had this absolutely pristine environment, the middle of a high-altitude desert, the only yeasts that went into that wine were good yeasts and that changes over time over over-production. And when he first started, chapter Mewzai was four acres. I think it's something like a hundred and eighty seven. Anyway, so there's that. What else do we talk about? We talked about there was the fashion side of it of it being a brand if you like and then we moved on to New Zealand. Yes, and I think as is always the case with these things, which I think is a very, very good question. When we talk about fashion, of course, fashion has affected wine every decade has ever been around, you know, and whatever the new friendly thing is on the block or a revival of a wine from the old days. The question is, is it fashion? Yes, it is. And the second question is, is it here to stay? Well, it is. It was for rather thus. It's always been made that way in Georgia. It's always made that way in Turkey. And I see a lot more wine going back to old ways, partly because it is far, far better for the environment. It's better for biodiversity. But for all of the things that we desperately mean in order to keep this planet asked. And therefore, do you see the prices for orange wines becoming more competitive? Surely there must be some people who work to actually realise, okay, this is wonderful, but we can't expect everybody to pay extra for it. I think the meaning is small quantities of our seasonal wine. These wines are very complex, very powerfully flavoured wine. And also we were talking about temperature and things like that orange wine as in a white wine with skin, the sort of effect it is poured and served like a red, a minimum of chinning, maybe just leaving it in a cell or somewhere. Often these wines taste far nicer at full room temperature, because you've got all these extra layers of texture and so forth in the wine. One of the things that it brings back to the whatever, simian wine making of Georgia, you know, 8,000 B.C. is they didn't have refrigeration then either. Wines which could be kept and they had, I will reveal over years, if not decades, in those days, had to be wines which could be made without refrigeration. And I think that's one of the great sins of wine making. It's the amount of electricity and water that is used in order to make wine. If you can get rid of refrigeration, even in the storage process, we're making wine a less damaging product of the world. And what I do like about orange wine, if they're good is you can sit there with your plates of cheeses and ams with the most amazing, you know, view in some wonderful country anywhere and where it does best have to be Europe, it can be anywhere. And you're drinking that wine at room temperature. There's something very, very primordial about the wine being the same temperature as the environment. And I like, I don't know, I can, you start to really buy into the whole ethos of purity and lack of using chemicals and letting nature do what it can in order to provide for you. Orange wine is something that I'm, I'm, I'm romantically attached to, but highly cynical. There's the most majority of them I don't find very best, but the good ones buy out and delicious. I will admit freely that my initial reaction to orange wine was very similar to organic, not biodynamic, because I always knew what the other process and the differences of that were, but organic I always felt a little bit sort of particularly in boredom. They're not necessarily organic, but they're not overusing sulfur deliberately. They're very managed. And I felt that organic became a little bit of a brand rather than an improvement in quality, shall we say, but then buy them out and came through. You're quite right. It continues to be so. I think people will charge an extra couple of dollars in America, so for why it's in California, they're organic. And when they say they're organic, they didn't have the same checks and balances we have in Europe. So they were still using wheat killer on the paths up to the vineyards and stuff, which is something which would be absolutely non- if you had a accreditation for organic wine making Europe. So there is, I mean, how organic is a wine? If they say organic, are they really, are they doing it for the right reasons? And those are the things you're, questions you're bringing up, which are quite right. The good news is I think because of this and wave of organic wines, it sort of gave everybody a kick at the ass to say Okay, we might not be organic, but actually there are some very valid points to organic wines and Erika pointed that out to us for a space of clearly about the pesticides and the insecticides. Well, right. I think, although I'm not a huge fan of organic wine labelling, I'm a huge fan of what it has done to the industry and the understanding. And, yeah, we wouldn't really have got this huge wave of biodiversity, and it winds without going through organic first. So, this progression is all very good, and I think naturally it's not just this kind of big move to protect the planets and environments and go green. I think actually it's just a natural progression of good wine making. And so we go to the third point, which is New Zealand. Now, I, for my pennies worth, I think they're doing such a good job because, listen, I just to clarify the reason I'm making the point of New Zealand is I think, I believe, Joe can correct me, but I'm sure that New Zealand is verging on 100% biodynamic as a nation, wine producing nation. Certainly, I think, biodynamic has very large cost implication. And so if you're going by full biodynamic, there are actually, there are, it's nothing, it's nowhere near 50%, because actually that's in very, very expensive process. But there is a devoutly organic process where people might be in the process of conversion or maybe going down that track. But certainly as a country, I imagine New Zealand is cleaner than virtually any other one country in the world in terms of, is it possibly 100% organic? Yeah, I would say so. I think that's likely. Okay. I've never been somewhere where people were so militant about anti-litering things like that. If you drop something on the floor, it was the jail sentence because they're protecting this incredible biosphere, this biome of incredible beauty and individuality. And bringing wine in has been a major quarter of concern to the real eco-warriors of New Zealand. Because of course, wine in of itself, no matter how careful you are, will have an impact on the environment around you. So you have to make sure that you leave space for rewilding. You have biodiversity that you try and be carbon neutral. And I think, as far as New Zealand's concern, I certainly am pretty sure that there's a country, it's the least carbon positive wine country in the world. So then they're probably the most carbon neutral as well as the most organic. When you go to places like New Zealand to Napier, to Marlborough, Marlborough is the most famous wine region. I would say New Zealand, well, all this lovely outwatering new Sony on blog comes from. I was there at the beginning landing an airplane near Wire Out Valley and seeing cloudy bay in the distance, a little bit of brown collar state, which is quite a bit of state at the time. The state called Jackson State, that was just conversing from cows to grapes. And it was wonderful. There was a little sense of pioneer ship of land and again, where in the middle of nowhere, it's a beautiful nowhere. And there's little pockets of very, very beautiful vineyards amongst wonderful, beautiful vibrant green kind of landscape. And then I went back 12 years later and as that plane landed, it was vineyard from horizon to horizon. And then it made me realise that even in New Zealanders, even those that really, really care about their environment, ultimately the industry of making Sony on blog is more important to the country than looking after the actual treat. Well, it's interesting because surely the conversion from dairy and from beef and arable is to vineyards, that must be a step in the right direction. It is a step in the right direction because of course, yes, you're quite right. And it's not like they were chopping trees down to make vineyards. That's a rarity, it does happen with new regions that are being explored. But repurposing a pasture is certainly a massive step in the cut right direction for carbon footprint and everything else. Also, by planting a vineyard, you can allow rewilding zones and a natural habitat to grow, which take a matter of a few years to really revitalise. So yes, wine has been the savior of arable farm, but at the same time they've got a long way to go before the whole thing gets back to normal. But then New Zealanders, I think, have a mission resale together, right? More than anyone else. And so finally, because they've done such great work, and they're making such clean, particularly white wines in this argument, I don't see a reason why any of them would revert to orange, but maybe I'm wrong. And there must be a few experimental things that they were doing. Yes, there was certainly, there was certainly some people making very, very good orange wine. They tend to be people that worked for the big man, maybe big, very high quality producers like Krahi range or Villamaria, and they've finished their wine making. They've gone off to do something individual for themselves. And it's those guys, the people that have done everything else that are off making orange wine. I think there's a part of the wine makers mentality that once you've learned how to make good wine, you want to prove it. So you want to be a very well-paid wine maker. You get a reputation for yourself. In your lifetime having the qualifies a wine maker, you're at the best of the weather every year. So maybe there's only 25 vintage, really good vintage, in your life, the chance to show what you can do. So when you go off and make your own wine, you start to diversify and make lots of different projects because you want to do it all before you retire, don't you? And you don't have many crats of it. So I think that you find that by nature, large companies are not interested in orange wine as a factor. But people who are moving on to do something more artisanal, maybe have a reputation of being extremely good at what they do, can afford to charge a little bit more and spend more money and more patience on making their wines in the first place. I think it's all a part of the whole, the whole movement of the wine industry that I think that orange wine isn't really suited to cheap mass production because it's not what it's about. No, but I think that as you say, the market is small enough and niche enough that those in it are prepared to spend a little extra. So there's always a market for it. Exactly as you points out. Absolutely. And wine maker who's flexing his viticultural muscles, there is demand. And I'm this episode, I'm so glad we've done this. This was a cool, absolutely beyond a surprise because I think in conclusion what we've worked out, I'm certainly converted. I was cynical to orange wines literally half an hour ago listener. So until this podcast, and I hope it'll have a similar effect to other people because that I think there's a, it's knowledge, it's an understanding you need to clarity of what things are, you need to be absolutely clear what something is before you can either criticize it or promote it. And I think the orange wine seems to be fascinating because at the moment, yes, a little bit pricey, but there's the niche market to cover that. That's wonderful. So it will promote the production of orange wines. But I think as we move forward as that market grows, then perhaps they can find ways of diminishing returns. They can expand their vineyards and bring their cost to stand relative to each bottle, etc. But I think rather like South America when it burst onto the scene, and they were producing slightly sort of oxidized wines for their local market, they quickly realized that actually internationally we don't need to make too much of a change, but we will slightly lose our identity, but equally they're not going to lose the tapicity of the area region full on. So where South America have embraced a more national market, possibly at the expense of a small identity of their wines, I'm hoping that the same will be said of orange wines because without question, when you speak of orange wines, the whole Eastern European production comes into question. And with the exception, maybe a Bulgaria, depending on how far East you want to go, and Hungary, Eastern Europe, for such a legacy of wine making, it's incredible how few wines there are. And I'm hoping that orange wine will be a massive port colors for them. And once that's lifted, we can go through and enjoy wines from an even ever-expanding production market. I think it's very interesting what you say, Richard, because I think it's important for this to be said, when a region becomes popular, becomes a part of the everyday mix, becomes a part of people's choice of wine make. And that usually means these wines have now arrived in the supermarket retail space, but we honestly that's really what it means. When wines from, let's say Czech Savag Czechia, from Montenegro, from Bulgaria, from Hungary, from Turkey, when these wines become made available, there is always the problem that consumers, including you and I, Richard, will find it very hard to read what's on the bottle and understand what, and then decipher what's said. So there is this thing that in order for a wine region to be noticed, they thought they have to make wines like everyone else. So a country like Bulgaria, now does have different local varieties, started plugging Shard, name, Merlot, all those other things. And that's how they got off the world stage back in the 80s and 90s through a through a bint fact. They were selling these really quite competent red wines around $2.99 but then you go back and think how much your identity ever we lost in order to get that, to get that, to be noticed, if you like. And we're now in the phase, we're now in the evolution phase of those those countries standing there ground and saying, okay, right, we made those wines for you so we could show you that these countries can make one. We've got the right climber and we're we're competent technical wine makers. A bit like, let's say Picasso's still life phase when he was shown people, he was a very good artist. We're now in the blue period. We're now in Cubism, we're now in that area where they're saying, you may not have come across wine like, but it might freak you out. But we make these wines and these upside down, I'm forer, we put the skins in, we bury them in the ground, but bear with us, try the result and you taste them and there's nothing like anything you've tried before. And so these reasons are getting an identity which actually adds an enriches the wine space rather than go. I can just sit, you see what I mean. I mean, nobody needs another Merlot, another Cavalier, another Shun. But we all want a Cush-Greux-Shoe or a Carol Ilyanica and I think the wit at that point, that's what's wonderful about this. And orange wines are full-flavoured and very intense and if indeed they are quite expensive, let's say you go to a fine wine bar in London, one that I really like near Paul de Strues with the Remedy. If you go into the Remedy wine bar and you buy a bottle of natural wine, I see you're having to pay 78 pounds for a piece, I'm really interested in what for that. Eight people can sit around and have them do our conversation over that. You know, it's not there just to question at first. It's way beyond that. I think it's the real pinnacle of the art in some ways. So you're absolutely right, I think people will spend the money, but I think in the next couple of years, we'll see a big reduction. I think we'll see people just getting more economically savvy in the production of orange wine and I think that's a very exciting thing. - The thing is that those people listening that might feel the interest of buying an orange wine, the next time they go to a good restaurant, if a restaurant is making a first of orange and you're not sure where to go, 'cause some of those wines would put hair in your chest. You may not be aware of the kind of wine you're buying. Just trust the stock. There's so many AF, he's gone to the trouble of giving you a list of orange wines. We'll have wines there which are delicious, the normal conventional wine drinker and he's got wines in there that will make rock full cry. And everything in between. So trust him if you want to, just tell him what you want. What kind of wines you like? And I'm sure he'll introduce you to orange wine in a spectacular way. - And likewise, on the, on the, by say the high street, but likewise probably at the moment, best to go through independent merchants who are really sort of, yeah. - Great, all right, well, thank you, Joe. Thank you to my brother and your Christian, who is here, as we say this, you can hear the shout out live for a brilliant question and you've answered it fantastically, Joe. So thank you very much, man. - No, that was a lot of the effort. - It was good, we haven't finished yet, Joe. So I'm signing off. (laughing) I'll sign off, we don't know what we're gonna be doing next, but as ever, thank you very much for joining us as we talk of wine. Cheers, Joe. Cheers, Richard. (upbeat music) (humming)