1990s onwards · Friuli, Slovenia and Georgia
The orange wine revival
Producers in north-east Italy and Slovenia revived extended skin-contact white winemaking, drawing on Georgian practice.
What happened
Josko Gravner and Stanko Radikon in Friuli and Slovenia began fermenting white grapes on skins in the 1990s, deliberately looking back to older methods.
Gravner subsequently imported Georgian qvevri, making the lineage explicit rather than coincidental.
The term "orange wine" was coined by a British importer in the 2000s. Georgia, where the tradition never stopped, uses "amber wine".
The category grew from near-invisibility to a fixture on restaurant lists within about fifteen years.
How firmly this is dated
Attested. Well attested, with the precise date or the attribution reconstructed rather than recorded at the time.
Producer accounts from Friuli, Slovenia and Georgia, and the subsequent commercial spread of the category.
Sources
Sources consulted
- Italian DOP and IGP wine register — Ministero dell’agricoltura, della sovranità alimentare e delle foreste (MASAF)
- Ancient Georgian traditional Qvevri wine-making method — UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — UNESCO
Along the timeline
Before · 1990s onwards
DNA analysis rewrites grape genealogy
Genetic testing overturned centuries of assumptions about where grape varieties came from.
After · 1980s onwards
The natural wine movement
A reaction against industrial winemaking that has been both genuinely influential and genuinely contentious.