10/06/2026
Happy National Orange W**e Day! Celebrate by grabbing a bottle or just learning a little more about it. Here’s what you need to know: Orange w**e is having a very modern moment, but the w**emaking technique behind it is ancient.
Long before “skin-contact” became a fixture on w**e lists, Georgian w**emakers fermented whole bunches of grapes in qvevri, large clay vessels buried underground. The juice stayed in contact with the skins, seeds, and sometimes stems throughout fermentation, extracting color and tannin along the way. That’s the key to understanding orange w**e: it isn’t made from a special orange-colored grape. It’s essentially white w**e made with a red-w**e approach.
And that’s what makes the current orange-w**e revival so interesting. Today’s producers are taking that old idea and running with it, playing with maceration time, vessels, native yeast, and different levels of extraction. The results can range from delicate and tea-like to deeply savory and seriously tannic. So while orange w**e has gained popularity in recent years, the technique has been around for centuries.
