As a category that’s attracting bartenders and a younger generation, the future’s bright, the future’s orange wine, according to Languedoc winemaker Gérard Bertrand, who’s taking the “fourth colour” to new heights.
Bertrand – whose Villa Soleilla was the highest-scoring sample in db’s inaugural Orange Wine Masters – has become a powerful force in the expanding orange wine sector: an area of the market gaining more widespread distribution, although still tiny compared to white, red and rosé. With hues ranging from light amber to golden, orange wines gain their distinctive appearance from letting the skins of white grapes leach their colour and phenolics into the must and fermenting wine over the course of days or weeks, rather than the normal approach for white grapes, which is to immediately press the berries to release the liquid from the colourless pulp, before discarding the skins. However, such a process is hard to get right, with some grapes better-suited to creating an orange hue, while, whatever the variety, the berries need careful handling to ensure they impart colour, but not bitter-tasting tannins from the skins, with Bertand admitting to db that he had embraced the orange wine category because he had sampled so many disappointing examples. “I’ve tried many orange wines over the last 10 years, and three years ago I asked my team to buy all the ‘good’ orange wines in the market and we tasted them together,” he told db in an exclusive interview last month, adding that this sampling exercise comprised
This Article was originally published on The Drink Business - Wine
