Orange wine - is not wine made from oranges. Orange wine is wine made from white wine grape varieties that have spent some maceration time in contact with the grape skins.

Typically white wine production involves crushing the grapes and quickly moving the juice off the skins into fermentation tanks and vats. The grape skins contain colour pigment, phenols and tannins that are often considered undesirable for white wines - while for red wines, skin contact and maceration is a vital part of the winemaking process that gives red wines its colour, flavour and texture.

Orange wines get their name from the darker, slightly orange tinge that the white wines receive due to their contact with the colouring pigments of the grape skins. These are white grapes left to ferment and exposed to oxidation, giving them a colour that verge on the orange/sienna shade.

This winemaking style is essentially the opposite of 'rose' production which involves taking red wine grape juice quickly off their skins, leaving the wine with a slightly pinkish hue. However in the case of Pinot Gris, among one of the more popular grapes to apply slight skin-contact treatment that is neither red nor white, the diffuse nature of the term becomes illustrated, as both an orange wine and a rose might achieve a similar expression of pink/orange/salmon-coloured wine.

The practice has a long history in winemaking dating back thousands of years to the Eurasian wine producing country of Georgia. In recent years the practice has been adopted by Italian winemakers, initially in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia wine region, while there is also production in; Slovenia, Croatia, France, Germany, California and New Zealand.

Orange wines were not uncommon in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s, but gradually became rare as technically correct and fresh/bright white wines came to dominate the local and international market.