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Orange?  There must be a better word for it.

When encountering an Orange wine on a menu or in a store, for the first time anyhow, even seasoned winos rightly scrinch their nose and turn, if not to the stars, to the starry-eyed server/sommelier and ask with a mix of innocence and apprehension, ‘Is it made from oranges?’

Alas, it is not.  Despite taking on the good, the bad and the ugly of each individual growing season and being similarly sensitive to their surroundings: soil type, light exposure, temperature shifts, watering and drainage, orientation—whereby fruit from different parts of the world will show deeper sugars and higher juice content in hotter regions, with more aromatic peel and sharper acids in cooler regions, where even on the same tree one will find south-facing fruit can have increased sugars and more vitamin C than their north-facing brothers and sisters, plus issues with fermentation such as hostile acidity, bitter pith and the (look it up) ‘vomit’ molecule—a different path has long been laid out for the humble orange.  It seems the best we’ve managed, after marmalade and duck à l'orange of course, is to infuse their pliant and redolent skins into boozy liqueurs, without which the cocktail world, and any at-home spirits cabinet, would be truly lacking.

So, why Orange?

Word has it that the word found its way into the world of wine in the early aughts via importer David Harvey (of Raeburn Fine Wines, UK) who, when describing the final colour of many of the whites he was working with that had been made with extended maceration during fermentation, coined them Orange.  And, like the tannin on the roof of your mouth from an over-oaked Barolo drunk the moment it is released, like a treacly Pedro Ximénez (PX) to your long-suffering teeth, it stuck.

It was long before the early aughts and long before Harvey (looking for ways to help his clients and their customers differentiate between zippy, lemon/lime, crystal clear white wines and the amber-coloured beauties coming from Northern Italy, Slovenia and Georgia) casually referred to them as such that Orange wine was being made.  For more than 6000 years white wines have been made in Georgia utilising maceration, a practice of which we can assume Greeks, as equally early grape hustlers, imbibers, and practitioners of ageing wine in clay vessels, were also guilty.  Whilst we don’t know what our ancestors actually drank, and there is more evidence suggesting the addition of herbs, honey, resin and seawater to wine (spritzer, anyone?), chances are its character and colour was closer to an Orange than it was to what we call a modern-day white.

We are fortunate, in these modern times, to have Orange wines coming from every corner of the globe: from the experimental cuvées of garage wineries in Adelaide (Australia) and Hokkaido (Japan) to well-established new-wave gurus of Côtes Catalanes (France) to Vinho de Talha of Alentejo (Portugal) and the clay-licked heart stoppers of Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Italy); in fact, there has never been more Orange wine on the market and the market is, just as us the drinkers are, all the better for it.  To that mix Greece doesn’t so much as throw it’s hat in the ring as it does turn in quick circles, unbutton its shirt, kick up dust and slap a fiddler cap on the top of the pile, and Yiannis ‘Johnny’ Mittas, of Oenos Mittas in Naoussa (Greece) more than loves a dance.

After a handful of years cutting his teeth with his cousin Kostis Dalamaras, the quiet maestro of revered Domaine Dalamara, the opportunity arose in 2018 for Johnny to purchase a small parcel of Xinomavro (1.8ha) on the sought-after clay-rich Paliokalias site (oft-touted as a Grand Cru plot for the region from where the most expressive fruit is sourced and the most premium of Naoussa wines hail) and in 2019 Johnny decided to turn his talents toward producing wines of his own, under his own name.  In addition to his flagship PDO Naoussa red wine, made entirely from Xinomavro and aged in oak barrels, Johnny has been experimenting with other cuvées over the years, a rattling white Assyrtiko (sadly no longer produced), gastronomic rosé wines, an old-school, super lean, quaffable red locally called kokkinelli (a diminutive form of the Greek κόκκινο), and a limited release orange wine made from the aromatic spitfire Malagouzia, called Airesis.

The fruit for the Airesis is sourced from sandy-loam soils in Neoi Epivates just outside Thessaloniki, is harvested in late August, typically spends 28 days on skins and just under 6 months in stainless steel tanks.

The eye is more blushed mandarin than a deep amber, like looking at the world through tinted specs. It is clean and clear with a small cluster of solidified tartrates at the base (so be cautious when pouring the last drip from the bottle).  As with most wines made from Malagouzia there is an unmistakably prominent jasmine (thank you Persian traders) and orange blossom notes reaching out at you from the glass.  Riding under that you’ll find a mishmash of furry peach skin, honey dew, ear wax, sage and tinned lychee—I say tinned because tinned fruits always carry with them a tinge of the chromium-coated steel in which they’ve sat and it can tease the palate with notes of either the medicinal or the bloody or both.

Most immediately the Airesis carries the unsubtle whack to the nose you get when you walk by a florist on an otherwise olfactorily dull street—and only then do you see the holey leaves of a monstera reaching toward you like the green hands of a woodland monster, the buckets of days-old gardenias and lilacs soaking at the stem and the surly-eyed florist stuck behind the counter rolling yet another hansaplast over another cut from another thorny rose.  There is lemon and black pepper crisps, crystallised ginger, citron-scented dish detergent and a sticky, syrupy essence, like burying your nose in a jar of compote, and yet it comes not with the promise that sweetness and light are to follow but the bitter pill that, as is the way of all flesh, nothing lasts forever.  In the tertiary, where the aromas come as ghostly whispers or forgotten memories, there is something of the fried-fat perfume of cheap fish taverns where the walls are lined with greasy portraits and everything comes battered and squids hang to tenderise outside the window. 

A bruised green apple tannic quality that sticks behind the front teeth and flirts with the upper flesh of the cheeks dominates the palate, with flecks of iron and flint, of dried mango that comes in crunchy clear plastic snack bags, of rosemary (bitter) and kerosene (peculiar).  It’s bright across the tongue, lively, tingly (not fizzy), with the acid acting as a catalyst for change, behaving like a juggler that keeps everything in the air whilst the tannins seem to want to pull everything back towards the earth, down a long rope nailed into the dirt.  Around that there is green olives sat in brine, cactus water, paracetamol, white miso, carrot and kimchi, something pumpkin and a touch of greenness from the skin contact that gives it a dusty, stemmy, stalky, fine-grained quality.  The lasting impression is spiced, taught, salt-crusted, limey, pickly and ever-oh-so-Orange, and if I were to take it I’d take it with smoked fish, with cheeseburgers and vromiko sandwiches, with oriental snacks such as gyoza and yakitori and pig’s ear and prawn toast, with asparagus (notoriously difficult to pair), ultimately with any kind of game.

Think sour yeast rising in a metallic bowl under a wet cloth or lemons stuffed into the ass of a chicken, think tangerine-coloured dissolvable multi-vitamin tablets and charred artichokes swimming in sheep’s butter, think seaweed lolling about in the waves at low tide and the lingering taste of stale nuts taken from a café cart on a long train journey, as pine and cypress trees flit by the window and the patchwork of stone houses—to which each subsequent generation has added an attic, a vegetable garden, a pergola, a gate—are little more than smoking chimneys and grassy knolls in various states of vitality and decay, and very now and then, when the train approaches a station and the brakes lightly hiss, a guy or gal in jeans and a gingham shirt might jump from the open door of the luggage carriage with a bag slung over a shoulder.  They might land like a cat on all fours.  They might stroll across a plateau of peach trees.  They might, on their journey, come across a ring of dancers and they might join that dance.  They might then pull from their rucksack a bottle of wine and offer it to the crowd, and after drinking the amber medicine the revellers might even shout, ‘This is no modern-day white!’  Twisting from one heel to the other with arms outstretched that guy or gal might sing out, ‘No—it’s an Orange,’ and the revellers might ask, ‘Is it made from oranges?’  But they won’t press the issue.  They won’t insist.  They’ll know, just from the smile on the face of the guy or gal, a contagious smile that they themselves cannot help but emulate, that it doesn’t matter what it is made from, or how; what matters is that it is delicious and its maker has just unbuttoned their shirt and thrown their hat in the ring.

Oenos Mittas 'Airesis' 2025 Macedonia, Greece

tasted October 2026
B.T.Tomlinson