There is a particular shade of amber that does not belong to autumn alone. It belongs also to old maps, to the inside of a lantern, to the color of rivers in late afternoon when clouds have not yet decided whether to stay or leave. That shade - warm, hesitant, somewhere between gold and rust - is what you find in a glass of orange wine.
Altugnac Orange is The New Wine comes from Gascony, from the Armagnac region of southwestern France. This is a landscape of rolling hills and oak forests, where the tradition of distillation predates Cognac by at least a century. The first written record of Armagnac brandy dates to 1310 - a physician in Auch described it as medicine. Whether it worked as medicine is a matter for historians. That it became something far larger than medicine is not in doubt.
The grape varieties here are Colombard and Ugni Blanc. Both are workhorse grapes - thin-skinned, high-acid, not particularly glamorous on their own. In the world of distillation, that high acidity is precisely what you want: it survives the copper pot, it carries flavor through fire and transformation. In the world of orange wine, that same acidity shows up differently - as structure, as a kind of architectural tension that holds the wine together.
Orange wine is not a new invention. It is, in fact, one of the oldest winemaking methods known to humanity. In Georgia and Armenia, grape skins were left in contact with the juice in clay vessels called qvevri, buried in the ground, for weeks or months at a time. The skins gave the wine tannins, color, complexity - all the things that red wine gets from its skins, but from white grape varieties instead. The result was amber. The result was something that could age, that could travel, that did not need refrigeration the way a pale, skin-free white wine does.
This method more or less disappeared from western European winemaking for centuries - displaced by cleaner, more reductive techniques, by the idea that white wine should be bright and transparent and cool. It returned, quietly and stubbornly, in the 1990s. A Slovenian winemaker named Joško Gravner began fermenting his wines in ancient amphorae, inspired by a trip to Georgia. Critics were confused. Sommeliers were confused. And then, slowly, they were not confused anymore.
Wisława Szymborska, Poland's Nobel laureate in literature, wrote often about small things that contain everything. An onion, a view with a grain of sand, a conversation with a stone. She believed that the universe does not need to be large to be infinite - that a single precise observation, held long enough, opens into something without edges. I think she would have found orange wine philosophically interesting. Not because it is fashionable - though it is - but because it refuses the categories assigned to it. It is white wine that looks like red. It is ancient technique that reads as avant-garde. It is a still wine from a region famous for its spirit.
The Altugnac bottle is 750 milliliters, alcohol content in the standard range of twelve to thirteen percent. The wine is unfiltered. Unfiltered wines may show slight haze or sediment. This is not a defect. It is the natural condition of wine that has not been stripped of its particles, its texture, its presence.
In aroma, orange wines from Colombard and Ugni Blanc typically show dried citrus peel, apricot skin, a hint of hay or chamomile, sometimes dried mango or quince. The tannin structure - unusual in a wine made from white grapes - gives a slight grip on the palate, a sensation more commonly associated with red wines. The acidity remains fresh, precise.
Classic serving temperature for this style: eight to twelve degrees Celsius. Cooler than room temperature, warmer than a standard white. The middle ground, as always, is where the interesting things live.
I think sometimes of the Polish highlands - the Bieszczady, those quiet mountains in the southeastern corner of the country, where the forest begins before you notice it and the light in September is the exact color of old amber. Szymborska herself was not a Bieszczady writer, but her sensibility - that patience with small things, that refusal to rush toward meaning - feels right for that landscape. And for this kind of wine, which asks nothing of you except that you look at it carefully before anything else.
Armagnac and Bieszczady are not connected geographically. They are connected, perhaps, by a certain quality of attention - by being places where people did not hurry, where old methods survived not out of stubbornness but because they still worked, where the product of a particular land carries the memory of how it was made.
This wine is a document. It records a season, a place, a decision to macerate rather than press and run. It records the fourteenth-century air of Gascony in the way that all fermented things record their origins: imperfectly, partially, beautifully.
More about this wine at darwina.pl - a place that takes the document seriously.
darwina.pl
