Natural Wine & Orange Wine

Natural wine is a broad, legally undefined movement rather than a regulated category. Its core principle is radical non-intervention: grapes are farmed organically or biodynamically, fermented with only ambient yeasts (no commercial inoculants), and bottled with little or no added sulfur dioxide and without the suite of additives permitted in conventional winemaking — no acid additions, no chaptalization, no fining agents, no micro-oxygenation. The wines are typically unfiltered and may show slight haze, refermentation in bottle, and pronounced microbial or oxidative character that conventional winemakers would classify as faults. Orange wine is a specific technique within this tradition (though it also exists outside it): white-grape juice is fermented in prolonged contact with its skins and seeds, sometimes for weeks or months, in open vessels or clay amphorae. The phenolic extraction from skins turns the wine a copper-to-amber color, builds tannin structure unusual for white wine, and generates flavors of dried apricot, bruised apple, quince, beeswax, and tea. Georgia's qvevri tradition — clay vessels buried in earth — is the oldest documented form of this practice, predating conventional white-wine winemaking by millennia. Contemporary orange winemakers across Friuli, Slovenia, the Jura, and the Rhône Valley have revived the style, often bottling under the natural-wine umbrella.

“She paired the braised pork cheek with a Slovenian orange wine — the wine's grip and oxidative depth handled the fatty richness in a way no conventional white could.”

• ConceptOxidative vs. Reductive Winemaking
• ConceptDecanting
• TechniqueMaceration

1. 1.Amber Revolution — Simon J Woolf (Interlink Publishing, 2018)
2. 2.The Natural Wine Company — Isabelle Legeron MW (CICO Books, 2014)
3. 3.The Oxford Companion to Wine — Jancis Robinson, ed. (Oxford University Press, 4th ed., 2015)

Confidence: high