Orange wine is white wine made the way a red is made. The juice stays on the grape skins instead of being pressed straight off them, and that single decision changes the colour, the texture and how the wine behaves at a table. How long it stays there decides everything else.
It is not a new idea, it is not natural wine by definition, and it is not orange in the way a naartjie is.
Orange wine, skin contact, amber: the same thing
Three names, one method.
A white wine is normally pressed as soon as the grapes arrive, so the juice leaves the skins within hours and the wine has no colour to speak of and no tannin. A skin-contact white leaves the juice sitting on the skins, the way a red does, for anything from a few days to several months.
The skins carry colour, aroma compounds and tannin.
Time decides how much of each ends up in the glass. Producers say skin contact when they mean the method, orange when they mean the category, and amber when they want to describe what is in the glass. None of them is more correct.
What five days on the skins does to a Chenin Blanc
Our Kottabos Chenin Blanc Skin Contact comes from two parcels on the granitic soils of the Polkadraai Hills.
It goes into the cellar as whole bunches, ferments at one hundred per cent whole-bunch, and sits on its skins for five days.
It then spends ten months in older, neutral French oak. Those are our cellar figures for the current vintage, as at September 2026, and they are published on the wine’s own page.
Five days is short. Some orange wines run for six weeks or six months, and those are a different drink entirely: deeply amber, properly tannic, closer to a light red in how you serve them.
Five days gets you stone fruit and a warm ginger note, a faint granitic austerity from the site, and a grip on the finish that a conventional Chenin does not have. The wine still drinks like a white. It just has something to push against.
Why we stopped at five days
Longer maceration is the easier wine to make a noise about. It is also the wine that stops being Chenin Blanc.
Chenin is South Africa’s most planted white grape and its appeal is a particular kind of nervy freshness.
Push the skin contact far enough and the tannin and the oxidative character take over, and what you taste is the technique rather than the site.
Five days extracts aromatics and a delicate grip without overwhelming what the fruit came in with. The neutral oak afterwards is the same logic: ten months of integration, no new wood, nothing added that competes.
It is the only wine of its kind we make, and it sits in the Kottabos range rather than the estate range for that reason. Kottabos is where we try the thing we have not done before.
How to serve it
- Cool, not cold. Fridge-cold shuts down the texture that is the entire point. Ten or fifteen minutes out of the fridge is about right.
- A white glass, not a tasting glass. It needs room for the aromatics to move.
- Twenty minutes in a jug helps. The grip settles and the stone fruit comes forward. Keep it cool while it sits.
- It keeps overnight. The tannin that makes it unusual also makes it more robust than a conventional white once it is open.
What to eat with it
This is where a skin-contact white earns its place, because it solves the food problem that ordinary whites and reds both struggle with.
Moderately spiced and aromatic food works especially well: a mild Indian curry, a Thai green curry, a Moroccan tagine.
The texture stands up to the spice where a crisp white would be flattened by it, and there is no red-wine tannin to fight the heat.
It also handles oily fish, smoked mackerel or roasted salmon, and it is very good with roasted butternut or an aged Gruyère. If you cook anything that has defeated your usual white, this is the bottle to try against it.
Is orange wine natural wine?
Not necessarily, and the two get confused constantly.
Skin contact describes one decision in the cellar: how long the juice stays on the skins.
Natural wine describes a broader set of choices about additions, filtration and intervention, and there is no legal definition of it anywhere.
A skin-contact wine can be made with a great deal of intervention. A natural wine can be pressed straight off the skins like any other white.
They overlap often enough that people assume they are the same thing, and they are not.
If you have never had one
Start short. A five-day wine is recognisably a white with something extra, and if you do not like it you will at least know what you are rejecting.
A six-month wine is a genuinely different drink, and people who begin there often conclude they dislike orange wine when what they disliked was the deep end.
Open it with food rather than on its own, because the texture is the argument and food is what makes the argument. Ours is here, and the conventional whites are here if you would rather stay on familiar ground.