Alves de Sousa Pessoal 2006

Or when is an orange wine not an orange wine?

Definitions are tricky things - often cumbersome, frequently inconvenient, sometimes merely hard to pin down. By way of example, I'm slowly refining my personal reference point for what constitutes orange wine and what doesn't - particularly fraught, as there's nothing in the way of a legal definition, and indeed the term was coined as recently as 2004, by wine importer David Harvey.

Last year, I initiated and participated in a first of its kind blind tasting of 72 orange wines for Decanter. Amongst other criteria, we needed a cutoff point for how many days of maceration a white wine needs to have before one could consider it "orange".  Not an easy question, but after some analysis of the classic orange/amber/macerated wines (substitute your own favoured term here) in regions such as  Friuli Collio, Goriska Brda and Istria, I drew a line in the sand at four days.

This rather arbitrary figure didn't keep me awake at night, until a kind friend sent me a bottle of Alves de Sousa's Pessoal …