our natural wine tasting
I like orange wines, because I find it reasonable to extract the flavors from the skin. and I like metodo ancestrale(nat pet), because I find this method has the advantage of champagne and is much easier to make. orange wines and nat pet are generally natural wines,so I end up buying a lot of natural wines.
On the other hand, il cuoco doesn’t like natural wines, and I think he could found a “I hate natural wine” club. I often drag him to taste natural wines, and right now there are a lot of natural wines in our cave.
to be fair, we bought these natural wines because il crucco also liked them, to be exact he said “it’s not a wine, but it’s nice to drink” .
but when we had the natural wine tasting on 2nd December, we both found these wines less pleasant than about one year ago,when we bought them.
For me, the significant flavor of orange wine is the volatile citrus peel preserved in salt and sugar, and probably pickles(not pickles soaked in vinegar but really fermented pickles). sometimes they just taste like belgian white beer made with citrus peels. I can also find this flavor in all the 4 orange wines, as always.
The 4 white wines we opened are all orange wines actually. the differences are: the bottle from Gigi is beer like opaque, the 3 bottles from Danielli is are more clear; the bottle from Gigi has higher acidity and has more fragrance of citrus,
The 3 bottles from Danielli have more stone fruit taste like peach and apricot.
As for the 2 natural reds from Gigi, we both prefer the old wine Aleatico one year ago, but now we find it not better than the other one, which is made of merlot. Probably that’s because Aleatico is a fragrant grape with less structure and body than most reds, the natural Aleatico tastes as good as natural whites but declines as natural whites.
Basically we both don’t like natural reds, I don’t even know why we have so many of them, but I definitely didn’t ask for natural reds.
to summarize: you should take orange wines as wines as rosato, just drink them when they are fresh, as soon as possible!
It actually makes sense—— because orange wine is the exact opposite of rosato: if you process white grapes as red wine(fermented with skin ),you will get orange wine; if you process red grapes as white wine(ferment juice only, without skin), you will get rosato.
The further question is: aren’t tannins supposed to be helpful to aging? why do orange wines and rosatos have less aging potential than a normal white made of the same grapes? my guess is that normal white wine is more stable because it’s more homogenized, and the tannins in rosato and orange wine only have small amount,not enough to preserve the wine, only make the wine unstable.