Ceci n'est pas un orange - La Biancara Pico

Simon tries to understand what Angiolino Maule means when he says he doesn't like orange wine.

“I don’t like orange wine”, says Angiolino Maule emphatically. “When you ferment white grapes on the skins for weeks or months, they become too tannic or oxidative and you lose the expression of terroir and variety”. Then he pours me a tank sample of a 2017 Garganega (the area’s major indigenous white variety) which stayed on its skins for four months, smiles cryptically and lets me taste.

It’s quite a surprise. Despite the very long skin contact, the wine has a soft and accessible texture and the recognisable volcanic tang of the variety. It is both concentrated and profound, but also pure and fresh. The apparent conundrum becomes clear. Maule is not against skin fermentation as a technique, he just believes it needs to be executed with care and attention to detail, in order to achieve elegance and varietal expression.

This example is an experiment, where netting inside the steel tank was used to separate the grape pips (which Maule believes are the main culprits when it comes to tanni…