4 days ago
How ‘sunset wines' are transforming traditional cocktail hour
Orange-wine drinkers used to style themselves as insurgents against the claret establishment. Now this wine colour hasn't just gone mainstream, it's been joined by a dreamcoat array of other shades of amber and rosorange and coral and fuchsia and cerise and vermilion.
These sunset hues span variations on the orange and orange-rosé themes. They also exploit a territory once known as clairet: the boundary between a very dark pink and a vibrantly translucent light red.
How 'sunset' wines get their colour
Orange and rosorange wine get their colour from 'skin contact', a process that has spawned a thousand innuendos and isn't quite as exciting as it sounds. Simply, most wine grapes contain pigment in the skins but have pale flesh and juice. This is why it is possible to make white Champagne from the black grapes pinot noir and pinot meunier, and why it is called blanc de noirs.
White wine is made by pressing grapes so the juice is removed immediately from the skins (and other solids), taking with it little of the pigment. In red winemaking, the grapes are crushed and fermented in contact with the skins, seeds and pulp, which results in more of the colour, and other compounds such as tannins, transferring into the wine.
Playing around with those norms and with the length of skin contact time, and the maceration temperature, can give you a different range of colours. Fermenting white grapes with the skins brings orange hues into the liquid; removing the fermenting juice of red grapes from the skins sooner can give you different shades of pink through to light red. Combining both approaches gives you rosorange.
What do skin-contact wines taste like?
These sunset wines are everywhere, but they're not very easy to classify. In restaurants, some wine lists, like that of Bar Valette in east London, have replaced the traditional red, white and rosé taxonomy with red, white and 'Neither red nor white'. Meanwhile Bobo Wines, the bag-in-box company, has called its version from Alsace Vin Blouge (a blend of blanc and rouge). 'The wine world's newest darling… part-white, part-red, maybe even part-orange… boundary-defying but utterly smashable,' goes the blurb.
This exactly nails the attraction. In appearance, such wines tempt the Instagram lens. In flavour, they engage aperitivo-hour drinkers, who look for wines with the appeal of a light cocktail; often fruity and chilled, perhaps with a vestige of florality and a tinge of either astringency or sweetness.
They're not wines you need to think about. They're not wines you match to food (they go with everything). They're pure social: bar wines, beach wines, festival wines.
Here are the ones I think you'll enjoy.
The best skin-contact wines
