Skin-contact wine

Why winemakers do it

Skins hold color, aroma, and tannin. Leave them in and a quiet white grape can taste broader, more herbal, and more savory. Pull them out quickly and you get a familiar pale white. The choice is a dial, not a switch.

The same grape can go either way. Pinot Grigio can be silver and crisp, or copper and lightly tannic. Ribolla Gialla can be a simple white or a deeper skin-contact wine. The label has to tell you which one you are holding.

Time changes everything

A few hours to a couple of days is a short maceration. The wine stays pale gold or light copper, with a hint of grip. One to four weeks is a middle style: apricot, tea, and a clearer tannic line. Several months, sometimes in a buried clay pot, is the deep amber end.

Longer is not better. It is just different. If you usually drink crisp white wine, a short contact is the honest introduction. The amber wine page is the far end of the same idea.

Words that help on a label

Look for skin contact, skin-fermented, macerated, maceration, on skins, amber, orange, ramato, or qvevri. Qvevri means a traditional Georgian clay vessel. It often signals a long soak, but the vessel is not required for skin contact. Steel and wood are common too.

• Skin contact or maceration: the method, whatever the color.
• Ramato: usually copper Pinot Grigio from northeastern Italy.
• Amber or orange: the color, often used when the wine is deeper.
• Qvevri: a clay pot, common for Georgian amber wine.

How skin-contact wine is made

The cellar steps that turn white grapes into skin-contact wine.

1. Start with white grapes. The fruit is white-wine fruit: Ribolla Gialla, Rkatsiteli, Pinot Grigio, and many others.
2. Crush and keep the skins. Juice and skins stay together. That contact is the whole idea.
3. Wait. Hours make a light copper wine. Weeks or months make a deeper amber wine with more tannin.
4. Separate and finish. The wine is drained off the skins, then fermented to dryness in most classic examples, and aged before bottling.