October Wine Focus - Orange pumpkins, orange wine

[Robin Garr]

It's October, Halloween is coming! Pumpkins are orange, and so is orange wine. Let's drink some!

[David M. Bueker]

Trick or treat. Orange wines are tricks.

Seriously, I’ve had Gravner. I’ve had Radikon. I can drink them. I wouldn’t buy them.

I do like the Idlewild Cortese, which is a 50/50 blend of light skin contact and zero skin contact.

Pretty much everything else leaves me feeling like a pumpkin four days after Halloween.

[Robin Garr]

Seriously, I’ve had Gravner. I’ve had Radikon. I can drink them. I wouldn’t buy them.

I do like the Idlewild Cortese, which is a 50/50 blend of light skin contact and zero skin contact.

Pretty much everything else leaves me feeling like a pumpkin four days after Halloween.

I had the great good luck to visit Gravner around 2001, before Slovenia was in the EU (getting across the border from Collio in Friuli with my hosts at the "unofficial" crossing in Oslavia without having to drive way down to the official crossing at Gorizia was a trip in its own right. That was when Josko was first experimenting with amphorae and nobody called it orange wine yet.

[Jenise]

I've had but a few Gravners, and they were superb. True story, we were once dining at the Ka'ana Kitchen at the Andaz in Maui, and had booked the kitchen counter with wine pairings. One of the first things the somm poured was a Gravner, which I had miraculously tasted one of just a week or three before and so nailed the wine. Total blind luck, literally; impressed beyond anything I actually deserved the somm then pulled corks right and left, even a grand cru Burgundy. We left the biggest tip of our life that night.

But back to orange wines: I didn't start out a fan but am being won over by winemakers like Kelley Fox in Oregon. Typically I don't realize it's an orange wine, but rather I buy the producer and only realize that categorically what I have is considered 'orange'.