Orange wine is a white-grape wine made by soaking the grapes with their skins, something traditional white wine skips, since its juice is pressed and left clear. The soak can last days, weeks or even months. It gives the wine an orange hue and extracts extra flavor, tannins and texture, which creates a deeper, more savory and complex character than most whites.
Grape-Growing
White grapes hang on the vine until they are ripe. They require a great deal of sun to ripen both the pulp and skins, accumulate sugar, and develop concentrated fruit flavors.
White Grape Harvest
Once the grapes are ready to be harvested, they are picked by hand or machine and immediately chilled in the winery to keep them fresh. At this stage, it is important that the grapes aren’t exposed to too much oxygen so they don’t spoil and develop unwanted bacteria.
Orange Wine Fermentation
In the winery, the white grapes soak with their skins for days, weeks, or months to extract added flavor, tannins and texture to the clear juice. This process gives the juice an orange hue.
(In contrast, traditional white grape juice is not soaked on its skins and remains a clear color).
Pressing
After a long soak, the grapes are pressed to remove the juice away from the skins.
The orange grape juice is placed into fermentation tanks, vessels, or barrels.
Yeast are added to the grape juice to consume the sugars and turn them into alcohol. This process may take a couple of weeks.
The temperatures are a bit warmer than traditional white wines to extract as much fruit flavor as possible left over from the skins.
Bottling & Aging
When fermentation completes, the winemaker must decide what to to do next. The wine may be:
1. Bottled for immediate consumption
2. Aged in oak to develop additional flavors and texture
3. Stored in a vat and bottled at a later date
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