Orange Wine & Korean BBQ

One weekend recently, I went to my friend’s house in Auckland to dog-sit and to spend my own staycation while my friend and her family were away camping in Northland. Clover, the black standard poodle, is my best dog friend.

While I was enjoying this beautiful orange wine from Sato with a plate of Korean BBQ short ribs, Clover enjoyed her own dinner.

If you are a regular wine drinker, you might have seen ‘orange wine’ at your local wine store, and wondered whether it was made with an orange fruit. However, this is not the right answer. Orange wine is made from a white grape variety, such as Pinot Gris, and the colour is achieved by allowing grape skins and seeds to come into contact with the grape juice. Usually with white grape varieties, skins and seeds are removed as soon as they are crushed open for fresh juice. However, to create orange wine, grape skins and seeds are left after the crushing, from a few days to a month or two.

This is an example of a natural wine, with few or no additives. The taste? You may be surprised when you taste orange wine for the first time. It is quite different from normal white wines and may taste mouldy, sour or nutty because of the oxidation.

My training as a wine expert, most accustomed to conventional wines and methods, means that my palate can struggle when it tastes natural wine or orange wine. It's a challenge to articulate everything I'm tasting.

The common characteristics of orange wines are a heavy body and notes of honey, dried stone fruit, nuts (hazelnut, cashew), juniper, sourdough and dried orange peel, with the dry tannin of a red wine.

From Central Otago in the South Island, Sato’s skin-contacted orange Pinot Gris has minimal added sulphite. I tasted orange blossom, a hint of white flowers, mild nectarine and apricot. The aroma suggests wet autumn leaves, and this wine has a lighter body than the usual skin-contacted Pinot Gris.

DenJang jji-gae (Soybean paste Soup - Korean traditional dish). Photo: Ghost Fresh Mart

Orange wine, like many natural to low-intervention wines, goes very well with Korean food. I drank this wine with galbi-sal (beef rib), danjang-jjigae (soybean-paste soup) and kimchi. Because orange wines have a bolder and heavier body than a white wine, with less intensity of fruit aroma, they are the perfect accompaniment for the strong flavours of Korean food.

Boneless Short Beef Rib: Galbi-Sal (Photo. 황제 갈비살: 조선화로집)

Mike Weersing at Pyramid Valley Wines produced New Zealand’s first orange wine in 2010. This ancient style of winemaking is increasingly fashionable around the world and growing in production in New Zealand, but the quantity here is still small.

What other orange wines are available from New Zealand?

Pyramid Valley Orange

Libiamo Gewurztraminer

Supernatural Spookylight

Hans Herzog Pinot Gris

Valli McCoy Skin Fermented Gibbston Pinot Gris