Happy Orange Wine Day! Or is it Amber?

6 Oct 2026

Every October 6th, Orange Wine Day gives us a good reason to talk about one of the wine world’s confusing naming issues.

Skin-contact wine as a product is indeed ancient. The term “orange wine” is very recent. And in Georgia, we usually call these wines amber!

Interest in the style is growing quickly in the UK. Searches for “Georgian orange wine” increased sharply over the past year, as did the growing interest in “Georgian amber wine”. So what exactly are we talking about?

What is orange wine?

The simplest explanation is white grapes made more like red wine.

For most modern white wines, the juice is separated from the grape skins before fermentation. With amber or orange wine, the juice spends time in contact with the skins, and sometimes the seeds and stems as well.

The skins contribute colour, tannin, flavour and texture. Depending on the grape variety, length of maceration and winemaking choices, the finished wine might be pale gold, light amber, orange, copper. The colour alone does not tell you what the wine will taste like.

An old method with a new name

The term “orange wine” appeared only in the early 2000s, when British wine importer David Harvey began using it as a straightforward way to describe white wines made with skin contact.

By then, producers in Friuli and neighbouring Slovenia had already been helping to revive interest in long-macerated white wines. Joško Gravner became one of the best-known names associated with the movement, eventually travelling to Georgia and adopting Georgian qvevri for his own winemaking.

Although, Georgia had never needed to rediscover the basic idea! Archaeological evidence from sites including Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora points to winemaking in the territory of modern Georgia around 6000 BC. That does not mean those Neolithic wines were identical to a modern Kakhetian amber wine, but it gives Georgia an extraordinarily long relationship with fermented grapes.

The surviving qvevri tradition is much easier to trace. In 2013, the ancient Georgian traditional qvevri winemaking method was added to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Why amber?

First of all, to avoid citrus-related confusion.

The word is also useful because we treat amber as a wine colour, right next to white, rosé and red. It does not suggest that every wine has the same flavour or belongs to the same winemaking philosophy.

During our recent visit to Georgia, Sarah Abbott MW spoke about the way Georgian wine is developing internationally. She remarked that the country “remains deeply rooted in its heritage while becoming less weighed down by its mythic past.”

For her, Georgian wine is increasingly being understood through a contemporary fine-wine language.

That feels particularly relevant to amber wine. Its history is fascinating, but these wines do not have to be treated as historical curiosities. They can simply be judged as wines.

Amber wine and qvevri are not the same thing

These two terms are often used together, but they describe different things. Amber describes the style of wine. Qvevri is the vessel.

An amber wine can be fermented or aged in qvevri, stainless steel, concrete, wood or another vessel. Qvevri can also be used for white, red and rosé wines.

The same applies to natural wine. Many amber-wine producers work organically, ferment with indigenous yeasts and use little or no sulphur. Others do not.

Skin contact is a winemaking technique. It does not automatically tell you everything else about how the wine was made.

What should amber wine taste like?

There is no single amber-wine flavour.

Think about white wines. They clearly do not all taste the same simply because they are white – the grape varieties, origin, ripeness, and winemaking techniques are the parameters that create the flavour profile. Amber wine works the same way.

You can find more details in this article of ours. Meanwhile, Sarah Abbott MW’s advice to people approaching these wines for the first time was simple: don’t be afraid of finding new dimensions in wine.

Orange Wine Day and Georgia

Orange Wine Day was created in 2018 to draw attention to a style that, at the time, was still unfamiliar to many drinkers. A few years later, orange and amber wines are no longer particularly unusual on the shelves of independent wine shops or on restaurant lists.

Sarah Abbott MW jokingly called Georgia “the OG of orange wine” during our conversation. It is a useful shorthand – and what makes Georgia special is the unbroken continuity and importance of the method within its wine culture.

So call it orange if that is the term that helped you discover it. In Georgia, we will still keep calling it amber.

Recommended reading

For a deeper dive into the modern orange-wine movement, Simon J. Woolf’s Amber Revolution is a good place to start.

For Georgian wine, Lisa Granik MW’s The Wines of Georgia and Miquel Hudin and Daria Kholodilina’s Georgia: A Guide to the Cradle of Wine explore the country from different perspectives, while Alice Feiring’s For the Love of Wine looks closely at Georgia’s traditional and natural-wine culture.

And if the archaeological side interests you, Patrick McGovern’s work is an excellent route into the much older story of wine in Georgia and the wider ancient world.