Orange Wine Flavor Map

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This chart/map is by no means a comprehensive representation of the thousands of skin-contact wines out there. That's not the point. And I'm not writing this to explain how "skin-contact whites" aka "orange wines" are made. I'm not even going to get into specific notes. This is all about flavor.

Through my own frame of reference as a wine buyer for the better part of a decade, I have seen the "Orange Wine" trend go rapidly from highly niche to more popular than rosé in a three-year period. In that time, I tasted a disproportionate amount of skin-contact natch in order to get a better sense of producers' styles and the general trends in consumer sentiment. What I found was that vinification almost always trumps terroir in the category. With similar winemaking ethos, you can have three wines from Portugal, Australia, and Oregon that all taste borderline-identical. It also goes without saying that the majority of producers releasing their first orange wine have only done so at the urging of their American importers in order to meet demand. Now the market is saturated with wines that shine a spotlight on smaller producers.

This is wildly uncommon in the American wine business, and I can't emphasize that enough. Normally, trends in consumer alcohol consumption are dictated by high-budget marketing campaigns designed to convince drinkers that the mass-produced product they're paying a premium for is something special. With the advent of the orange/natural wine revolution, styles of wines containing what were traditionally considered "faults" in the Western tradition became trendy globally, as social media brought wine consumption to the international zeitgeist. Smaller importers, with less affluent and more amicable producers in their portfolios, suddenly had the upper-hand. Importers focusing in Italy and Eastern Europe, where the tradition of skin-contact whites was alive and well, had a head-start in the market. Other wine hunters were able to were able to pressure said winemakers to put out some experimental products. Producers who were traditional red wine producers were able to use that expertise to rapidly convert their failing white wine production into a thriving new product.

So why is this "natural" and "orange" wine becoming so popular with young drinkers? An older generation might assume the motivation is ideological, but the easier answer is that natural wine production offers a greater variety of flavor profiles. Remember that most vinifera wines of European origin are based in the tradition of pairing with a Western diet--and long-standing traditions of production in Western Europe and the former British colonies are primarily designed to pair with the common food of the West. Traditional wine pairing is changing as rapidly as the diversity of our diets and the imaginations of our gastronomical figureheads.

But does it taste good? That's still up for you to decide. In my opinion, there is a skin-contact white wine for every palate, drinkers just need to be educated about what to ask for. I do hope this flavor map can demystify skin-contact whites in some discernible way for you. In creating it, there were two metrics I thought were most important to emphasize, as they're the main things that differentiate orange wine drinkers' tastes: Structure and Natch Funk.

The former classifier is easier to demystify. Higher alcohol and tannin, along with other complex phenols and acids, will result in a wine that feels more "structured"--a wine that plays on your palate in a more intense and complex way.

The latter qualifier is always the harder one: FUNK. When people come to me asking for orange wine, the only word most can usually offer for what it should taste like is "funky." This is a terrible adjective to use as a customer in wine retail, because most sales associates will immediately relate your desire for "funk" as a desire for wine flaws and faults: brettanomyces, pyrizines, volatile acidity, reduction, refermentation, mouse, and imbalance. Instead, what they might be asking for is tannin--or maybe they are indeed asking for one of these "faults" that have found a new appreciation on modern palates with more exposure to both Eastern and industrialized cuisines than previous generations.

To qualify the degree of "funk" for the map, I considered a combination of outright "traditional" faults in addition to flavors that wouldn't normally occur outside the realm of skin-contact white wines.

Please remember that the metrics of this map are variable, and the same vintage/batch of a wine might not be the same one you tried. If you want me to add a wine to the chart or readjust, send samples.