Skin-contact wine

Skin-contact wine, amber wine, or orange wine is a type of wine made from white wine grapes where the juice from the crushed grapes is allowed to contact the grape skins for an extended period of time. Typically white wine production involves crushing the grapes and quickly moving the juice off the skins into the fermentation vessel. The skins contain color 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 wine its color, flavor, and texture. This style of wines can also be known by their color references of having an amber or orange tinge that the base white wine receives due to its contact with the coloring pigments of the grape skins.

This winemaking style is essentially the opposite of rosé production which involves getting red wine grapes quickly off their skins, leaving the wine with a slightly pinkish hue. However, in the case of Pinot gris, among the more popular grapes to apply a skin-contact treatment that is neither red nor white, the diffuse nature of the term becomes illustrated, as both a skin-contact wine and a rosé might achieve a similar expression of pink/amber/orange/salmon-colored 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, Germany, New Zealand, and California.

Skin-contact wines were not uncommon in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s, but gradually became obscure as what were view to be technically "correct" and fresh white wines came to dominate the market.

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