I’m sitting at a trendy restaurant in Silver Lake, a self-proclaimed hip suburb of Los Angeles, which is a self-proclaimed hip city to begin with! The wine list isn’t this giant book of wines, but rather a curated selection of both fan-favorites as well as obscure options to choose from. Uh oh, what’s this, the categories seem somewhat strange… something is sitting between the Whites and Reds. Orange wine? Wine made from oranges? Why would someone do that? And better yet, why would they be so popular as to add them to this list? I ask the waiter what sick joke this might be, only to find out that these wines are still made from grapes - phew! More importantly, they gain their orange hue from being fermented on the skins. These are white wine grapes that are fermented on their skins with the objective of imparting tannin and texture on the wine. As I paid the bill thinking to myself how avant-garde I am for essentially discovering an entirely new category of wine, I take to Google to find out that I am rather late to the party. About 8000 years late.
Natural, Skin Contact, and Orange… all terms used synonymously for the same style of wine. One that is made primarily from white grape varietals, but is produced the same way as red wines. Typically, with white grape varietals, the clusters are destemmed, deskinned and then fermented. This allows the wine to focus on the acidity that we all crave, not to mention come out with that clear slightly yellow hue that we’ve all come to categorize as white wine. Natural wines, however, are fermented with their skins, either on or off the grapes. This allows the juice to capture more of the properties that live only in the grape skin. Things like tannins, concentrated fruit, spice, and dried tea leaf aromas, that can add an entirely new profile to the wine, and most, its orange colour.
While we interestingly may feel that this is a new style, bread from a desire to disrupt the wine market, Natural wines are actually the foundation of winemaking. As of right now, wine was discovered to have been present in the Caucasus Mountains and the Middle East 6000 years BCE, where at that time, mostly white wine grapes were grown. It’s understandable that at the time, they wouldn’t have had the technology or patience to deskin each grape for the purpose of having clear wines, but rather would have found the easiest path to fermentation possible: pick the grapes, crush them for juice, and wait for them to ferment into wine. The development of the industry over centuries created new practices, more sophisticated methods, and different taste profiles which brought us to compartmentalize wines into white and red, leaving leniency only to that of Rosés and Sparkling.
But as the adage goes, history does, in fact, repeat itself. While areas in the Middle East never stopped making Natural wines, they became less and less popular as we gravitated more towards what we know. All of that is now changing… back.
Natural wines are increasing in popularity as people seek out minimal intervention in winemaking practices - looking for alternatives with fewer additives such as sulfites and proteins used for stabilization. With no coincidence, regions around California have been toying with the style given its compliment to natural and sustainable farming - a movement that California has hopped on in the last decade. In fact, in most wineries around Napa and Sonoma, you should be able to find a skin-contact offering that will range from crystal clear with the slightest orange hue, to a cloudy and firey coloured wine with sediment sitting at the base just waiting to be swirled into your glass.
This year’s The Ride is an ode to the California Orange wine. We’ve attempted to be as bold as our neighbours in producing a very natural wine out of a local grape that performs well in Ontario. Our 2021 The Ride is made 100% from Gewurztraminer, where in Ontario, it is commonly used for single-varietal Icewine. With our attempt to make it as natural as possible, we’ve hand harvested the fruit and fermented whole-cluster, using native yeasts. We’ve bottled the wine fresh and unfiltered to ensure that every bit of this wine’s character comes with you as you pour it into glass. While this wine may keep for a couple of years, we suggest enjoying it as soon as possible, as natural wines have a tendency to deviate from the desired profile when left alone for too long.