You are standing at the wine shelf and there is a bottle the colour of weak tea sitting between the whites and the rosés. The label says something you cannot pronounce. The shop assistant calls it "orange wine" and you nod like you knew that, then buy the Sauvignon Blanc you always buy.

Fair enough. But orange wine is one of the most interesting things you can put in a glass right now, and it is far less intimidating than the hype around it suggests. Here is what is actually in the bottle.

What is orange wine?

Orange wine is white wine made like red wine. That is genuinely the whole idea.

Normally, when white wine is made, the grapes are pressed and the juice is separated from the skins almost immediately. The skins go off to the compost heap and the juice ferments on its own, which is why white wine is pale and, well, white.

With orange wine, the skins stay in. The juice ferments in contact with the grape skins and seeds for anywhere from a few days to several months, exactly as it would for a red. Those skins leach pigment, tannin and texture into the juice, and the result is a wine that looks amber, bronze, copper or deep gold, and tastes like nothing else in the white section.

You will also see it sold as skin-contact wine or amber wine. Same thing, different marketing.

Is orange wine made from orange grapes?

No. There is no orange, no orange peel and no flavouring involved. Every drop of that colour comes from white grape skins. Depending on the grape and how long the wine sat on those skins, you get anything from a pale gold to a properly dark amber.

Is orange wine a new trend?

This is the part people get wrong. Orange wine is arguably the oldest style of wine still being made.

The technique goes back around 8,000 years to Georgia, where grapes were fermented on their skins in qvevri, egg-shaped clay vessels buried in the ground. The method survived continuously for millennia, and in 2013 UNESCO added the ancient Georgian qvevri winemaking tradition to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage.

The modern revival is much younger. In north-east Italy, the Collio producer Joško Gravner famously walked away from stainless steel in the late 1990s and turned to Georgian clay amphorae, and Friuli and neighbouring Slovenia became the European heartland of the style. Within a decade or so, "orange wine" had become a global category, complete with natural wine bars and a certain kind of enthusiastic queue.

So it is a very old idea, recently rediscovered by people who found it new.

What does orange wine taste like?

Think of it as sitting between a white and a red rather than being an odd white.

Common tasting notes include dried apricot, orange peel, honey, hazelnut and black tea, wrapped in a savoury, slightly nutty character. What surprises most people first is not the flavour though, it is the texture. Because it has been fermented on skins, orange wine has grip. It has tannin, the same drying, tea-like sensation you get from a red, which almost no white wine offers. If you want a refresher on how tannin, acidity and body actually feel in the glass, our guide to wine characteristics and how to identify them breaks each one down.

The style also spans an enormous range. A wine that spent four days on skins is a gentle, lightly textured white with a golden tint. One that spent four months is a deep amber, firmly tannic, and genuinely closer to a light red in feel. Both are correctly called orange wine, which is why one bottle can charm you and the next can throw you completely.

Many orange wines are also unfiltered, so a slight haze in the glass is normal and not a fault. We covered why that happens in clear vs foggy wine.

How should you serve orange wine?

Not fridge-cold. This is the single biggest mistake, and it is an easy one to make because the bottle looks like a white.

Aim for around 13°C, cooler than a red but noticeably warmer than a crisp white. Too cold and the aromatics shut down while the tannins turn harsh and bitter. Let it warm up in the glass for ten minutes if you have over-chilled it. Our wine serving temperature guide has the full range if you want the numbers for everything else too.

Longer-macerated, more tannic bottles also respond well to air. Half an hour in a decanter helps the tannins settle and lets any initial funky, cidery notes blow off. If decanting feels like a faff, here is how to do it properly without any ceremony.

Use a normal white wine glass with a reasonably generous bowl. You do not need special glassware.

What food goes with orange wine?

This is where orange wine earns its keep. That combination of acidity, savoury depth and tannin makes it one of the most food-friendly bottles on the shelf, and it handles dishes that defeat both conventional whites and reds.

Reliable pairings include:

• Aged hard cheeses and charcuterie — the tannin cuts through fat beautifully

• Mushroom dishes — earthy meets earthy

• Indian, Korean and Thai food — the texture stands up to spice and aromatics where a delicate white would vanish

• Roast chicken and slow-braised meats — enough structure to keep up

• Sushi and oily fish — a rare white-adjacent wine that does not clash

If a meal has you stuck between a white and a red, an orange wine is very often the answer.

What orange wine can't do

Honesty time, because this style gets oversold.

It is not a beginner-friendly crowd-pleaser. If you love bright, fruity, easy whites, a heavily macerated amber wine can taste austere, sour or oxidised on first encounter, and that reaction is completely legitimate. It is not a palate failure.

There is also no legal definition of orange wine, no minimum skin-contact time and no shared standard. The label rarely tells you how many days the wine spent on skins, so two bottles at the same price can be wildly different experiences. That makes buying genuinely unpredictable.

And "orange" does not automatically mean natural or low-intervention, even though the two scenes overlap heavily. Plenty of orange wines are made conventionally.

Best approach: start with a shorter-maceration bottle from Friuli, Slovenia or Italy's north-east, ideally with food, and work towards the darker, more extreme end once you know whether you like the texture.

Ready to find out if orange wine is your thing?

The problem with a style this varied is that recommendations from strangers only get you so far. What suits a reviewer's palate may not suit yours, and one disappointing amber bottle can put you off the entire category unfairly.

That is exactly the gap Swirl fills. Scan the label of any orange wine with your phone and Swirl tells you what is actually in the bottle, then logs your reaction to it. Every wine you rate sharpens your private taste profile, so the app learns whether you go for the gentle golden styles or the properly tannic amber ones, and recommends accordingly. If you want a primer on decoding those labels yourself in the meantime, start with how to read a wine label or brush up on the most common wine grapes.

With Swirl you can:

• Scan any wine label instantly and see what you are holding

• Build a private taste profile based on your palate, not crowd ratings

• Save favourites and keep tasting notes only you can see

• Get personalised recommendations that improve every time you use them

• Track your collection and remember the bottle you loved last spring

Download Swirl and start building your taste profile

Sources

• What is orange wine? Understanding skin-contact white wines — WSET

• Skin-Contact White Wines, a.k.a. Orange Wine for Beginners — Wine Enthusiast

• You've Been Drinking Orange Wine Wrong (serving temperature) — Wine Enthusiast

• Ancient Georgian traditional Qvevri wine-making method — UNESCO

• Qvevri Wine — National Wine Agency of Georgia

• Gravner — LITTLEWINE

• What is orange wine and how is it made? Ask the Sommelier — Club Oenologique

• Orange wine — Wikipedia