Burgenland Orange: A New Shade for the DAC?

A group of hands holding glasses of orange wine
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When Italy’s Collio DOC voted in December 2024 to include orange wines in their disciplinare, the news barely caused a ripple in the grand lake that is global wine. Meanwhile, I was in a state of mild shock. One of Italy’s most conservative appellations had just voted to allow orange wines to bear its hallowed classification. 

The decision clearly made sense: Collio is ground zero when it comes to orange wine. It was here, after all, that seminal growers like Gravner and Radikon redefined skin-fermented white wines in the late 1990s. Once considered heretics, their approach is now established worldwide. If Italy’s wine bureaucracy could embrace this change, why not Austria too? I was reminded of a question Michael Moosbrugger, director of Schloss Gobelsburg in Kamptal, once asked me: could I imagine an Austrian appellation for natural wines? It felt rhetorical at the time, but now his words felt more than prescient.  

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