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.
Simon J. Woolf has been writing about wine since 2011 in magazines, books, on and offline. He writes about what he personally likes to drink, and the overarching themes he covers - organic and biodynamic farming, sustainability, low intervention, natural and orange wine - all represent his own deeply held beliefs and passions. His first book "Amber Revolution - How the World Learned to Love Orange Wine" has become the go-to guide to this wine category. "Foot Trodden - Portugal and the Wines that Time Forgot" was published in 2021, and co-written with Ryan Opaz. Both books were New York Times wine books of the year, and "Foot Trodden" was shortlisted for a James Beard award.
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