Orange Wine Isn't Always Qvevri Wine

Somewhere in the last decade, orange wine turned into a catch-all. It lands on a wine list next to a buried Georgian amber, a skin-contact Ribolla Gialla from Friuli, and a natural orange fermented in a steel tank, as though the three were the same creature. They are not. Two of those describe how a wine was made. One describes what it was made in. Learn to tell the method from the vessel, and a surprising amount of wine-list confusion falls away.

And this is where it starts to cost you money. The name you put on a wine at the moment you pour it decides whether the person in front of you gets it or quietly writes the bottle off as faulty. So let me lay it out properly, starting with the two words that get muddled the most.

Orange describes how, qvevri describes where

Orange wine has one honest definition, and it has nothing to do with oranges. You take white grapes and you make them the way you would make a red: crush them, then leave the juice sitting on the skins, pips, and sometimes the stems, for anything from a few hours to several months. That skin contact is the whole trick. It pulls colour, tannin, and grip out of the skins, and it turns a wine that would have been pale and crisp into something amber-hued, textured, and savoury. Think of it as the mirror image of rose, where red grapes are handled gently like a white. Here, white grapes are handled firmly like a red.

Notice what that definition never mentions: the container. Orange is a decision about method, and you can make that decision in a stainless-steel tank in California, an old oak barrel in Friuli, a concrete egg in Australia, or a clay pot buried in a Georgian courtyard. The wine is orange because of what happened to the skins, not because of what it happened inside.

A qvevri is the opposite kind of word. It names a thing, not a technique: a large, egg-shaped clay vessel, buried in the ground, that Georgians have fermented and aged wine in for eight thousand years. And here is the part people miss. You can put anything in it. Red grapes, white grapes, rose. The qvevri does not care what colour the wine is. It is a place, not a recipe.

Where the two words overlap, and where they don't

Once you see method on one side and vessel on the other, the overlap gets easy to picture. Take white grapes, ferment them on their skins, and do it inside a buried qvevri, and you have made a wine that is both orange and qvevri at the same time. Most of Georgia's famous amber wines live exactly here. That single overlap is why the two words got welded together in the first place.

But the overlap is not the whole picture, and this is the bit worth memorising. An orange wine does not have to be a qvevri wine. That skin-contact Ribolla from Friuli, fermented in steel and rested in old oak, is orange to its core and has never been near a clay pot. And a qvevri wine does not have to be orange. Ferment Saperavi, Georgia's flagship black grape, in a qvevri and you get a deep, tannic red, as red as anything from Bordeaux, made in the most ancient vessel on earth. It is a qvevri wine. It is not remotely orange.

So the clean version, the one to keep in your back pocket: an orange wine can be a qvevri wine, but a qvevri wine is not necessarily orange. One is about how. The other is about where. They meet in the middle, and everywhere else they go their separate ways.

In Georgia, the word is not orange, it is amber

There is one more wrinkle, and Georgian winemakers will gently correct you on it. They do not call their skin-contact whites orange. They call them amber. It sounds like branding, and in a way it is, but there is real substance underneath.

When I interviewed Sopho's Family Winery for the blog, this was exactly their point, and it was blunt and correct: sell one of these as a white wine and most people are disappointed the moment it hits the glass, because it looks and tastes nothing like the crisp white they pictured. Sell it as an amber wine, explain why it is amber, what full skin contact does, why it carries tannin and structure a white never would, and the same person settles in and enjoys it. The word sets the expectation, and the expectation decides whether the wine lands.

Made properly, a Georgian amber is white grapes fermented whole, skins and pips and often stems, with a natural fermentation and little more than a whisper of sulphur added. The result is full-bodied, deeply structured, and tannic, closer in feel to a red than to any white you know. Georgia has an absurd 525 indigenous grape varieties to draw on, so the range hiding under that one amber umbrella is enormous. And amber is the country's calling card abroad: the colour alone makes people ask a question, and the question is an open door to the whole story of Georgian wine. That is not an accident. It is the smartest piece of positioning in the wine world that almost nobody outside Georgia talks about.

Orange, amber, yellow: three words for the same wine

Here is something the trade rarely admits out loud: orange wine is a marketing word, and a young one. Winemakers were making skin-contact whites for thousands of years before anyone thought to call them orange. The name was popularised in the early 2000s by an English importer who needed a simple, sellable handle for a style most drinkers had never met, and it stuck, because orange is easy to say, easy to picture, and just odd enough to make someone curious. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a selling technique, not a description handed down through tradition, and that is worth knowing when you are deciding what to print on a label.

Georgia never took the word on. To a Georgian these wines are amber, and reaching for orange with a Georgian producer quietly rebrands eight thousand years of their tradition with a term younger than most of the people drinking it.

Cross into Armenia and the name shifts again. Here the wine is often called yellow, and the reason is pure Armenia: the colour sits close to the apricot, the fruit that fills orchards across the country and that Armenians hold as a national symbol. Georgia named the style after amber. Armenia named it after its apricots. Same wine in the glass, three flags on the bottle, and each name carries a whole country's sense of itself. Which is exactly why orange, the one word with no homeland and a marketing push behind it, is the one to reach for with the most care.

What the buried clay egg actually does

It is worth understanding why anyone buries a giant pot of wine in the ground, because the qvevri is not a rustic gimmick. The shape does real work. That egg form, narrow at the mouth and pointed at the base, sets up a slow, natural circulation as the wine ferments, keeping the skins and lees gently moving instead of sitting in a dead heap. The lees settle into the point at the bottom, so the wine above stays clean without filtering. And the clay itself breathes, trading a trace of oxygen through the walls, softening the wine the way a barrel would, but without lending it any oak.

Then there is the burial. Sink the qvevri into the earth and the ground becomes your temperature control: cool, stable, and free, holding the wine steady through a Caucasian summer with no electricity involved. Georgia protected all of this in 2013, when UNESCO added the traditional qvevri winemaking method to its list of intangible cultural heritage of humanity. And the craft is having a moment. When I spoke with Sopho's Family Winery in 2024, the wait to buy a new qvevri already ran to about three years, because demand has outstripped the tiny number of people who still know how to make one. Which brings us to the part almost nobody explains properly.

A Georgian qvevri and an Armenian karas are not the same pot

Cross the border from Georgia into Armenia and the buried clay pot does not disappear. It changes its name, its clay, and the way it sits in the ground. In Armenia the vessel is not a qvevri, it is a karas, and treating the two as interchangeable quietly erases a whole country's tradition.

Start with the ground. Georgians bury the qvevri completely, right up to the rim, so all you see in a traditional cellar is a row of clay mouths flush with the floor and the whole body of each vessel swallowed by the earth. Armenians did it differently. They sank the karas only about two-thirds of the way down, leaving the top third standing proud of the ground, and sometimes they did not bury it at all.

This is not a modern quirk. It reaches all the way back to Areni-1, the cave in Armenia's Vayots Dzor region that holds the oldest known winery on earth, more than six thousand years old, where the clay vessels were set into the floor rather than swallowed by it whole. The Armenian way of half-burying the pot is, quite literally, among the oldest ways we have any evidence for.

And Zorik Gharibian, who founded Zorah in Vayots Dzor, puts it plainly: why do it any differently from the ancestors, who most likely already knew it should sit two-thirds buried rather than whole? In Zorah's early days he tried all of it. He buried the karas completely, the way the Georgians do. He buried them two-thirds down. He left them standing above the ground entirely. In the finished wine, he says, he could taste no difference at all. The only thing you don't have to worry about when you bury them two-thirds down is climate control. So why twist history, when the people who came before had probably already worked out what works best?

The clay is its own story. Georgian and Armenian potters worked with the earth under their own feet, and those earths are not the same, so a karas and a qvevri were never built from identical material. That difference in raw clay is part of why an Armenian producer who wants to revive the vessel today cannot simply order Georgian pots and call it a day. Well in theory they could, but not without abandoning their own heritage. And that is why Zorah is hunting down the right local Armenian clay, trying to work out how to make a true karas again.

One craft survived the twentieth century, the other did not

Here is the difference that matters most, and it is a difference of survival. In both countries, the twentieth century nearly killed the craft of making these vessels. The Soviet machine wanted wine by the tanker, not by the clay pot, and traditional vessel-making was pushed to the edge of extinction. In Georgia, if you were caught making qvevri at home, the authorities would smash them.

Georgia "got lucky and got stubborn". The knowledge survived inside a tiny handful of families who kept going quietly, and today qvevri are still made by hand in only about five villages: Vardisubani in Kakheti, Shrosha and Makatubani in Imereti, and Atsana in Guria. Names like the Kbilashvili and Bozhadze families are a large part of why the craft exists at all. It came within a whisker of vanishing, but it did not vanish, and the UNESCO listing and the natural wine boom have since pulled it back from the brink.

Armenia on the other hand was not so fortunate. Under the same Soviet pressure, karas-making was not just discouraged, it was effectively stamped out, and clay-vessel production was allowed to carry on only in Georgia. Until the 1950s, Armenian master potters would make karas and sell them from village to village once or twice a year. Then that stopped, the last makers put down their tools, and the knowledge went with them. Today, there is nobody making a genuine Armenian karas from Armenian clay. An Armenian winemaker who wants to work in clay has two choices: track down an old surviving karas or buy a Georgian qvevri and make peace with the fact that it is not quite the same thing. That is why Zorah's hunt for the right local clay matters so much. It is not nostalgia. It is a country trying to dig its own tradition back out of the ground.

Why the right word is worth the trouble

All of this might read like pedantry until you are the one standing in front of a customer, a buyer, or a room of tasters, deciding what to call the wine in the glass. Call a Georgian amber an orange wine and you have flattened eight thousand years and the country's proudest positioning into a trend word. Call an Armenian karas wine a Georgian qvevri and you have handed one nation's heritage to its neighbour. The words are not decoration. In wine, the words are the product.

Precision here is not showing off. It is hospitality. Knowing that orange is a method and qvevri is a vessel, that amber is the Georgian word and karas is the Armenian one, that one craft survived and one is being clawed back from the dead, gives you something no tasting note can: a true story, told in the right words, that makes the person in front of you want to hear the rest. That is the whole game. The wine gets you the first sip. The story is what sells the bottle, and the case, and the one after that.

The clay has been in the ground for six thousand years. The least we can do is get its name right.

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Written by

Margot van Lieshout DipWSET FWS RV

Wine marketeer, sales expert with over 20 years in the trade, public speaker and international wine judge. Thousands of wines scored from Steiermark to Ningxia, and a trade she knows from the inside out. Wine with Margot is where she helps wine brands tell the stories that sell them.

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