Orange Wine Festival is an annual wine party in Izola, Slovenia, where orange wine lovers have a chance to meet the winemakers. It is a fun and uplifting event, without much expectation of trade or business contacts for the winemakers. It is rather a chance for them to see the reaction of those that enjoy orange wines to their latest offerings and have fun together.
This year, however, there is a business-oriented Orange Wine Festival to be held on 3rd of April as a part of VinItaly in Verona, one of the largest wine fairs in the world. It is intended to bring together professional wine buyers from the retail and HORECA sectors with winemakers themselves.
Plavinci Winery will be representing Serbia, hoping to bring attention to a small group of artisanal, natural winemakers that have emerged in the past 10 years. Orange wine is made from white grapes, where skins remain in contact with the juice after crushing. During this time, called maceration, some of the color, tannins and other substances get extracted from the grape skins and produce wine with appearance and aroma somewhere between white and red wines. Thanks to this maceration, and maturation of the wines on the lies, orange wines have the ability to remain viable for a very long time without any additives or preservatives. Most orange wines are made from organic or biodynamic grapes. Almost all wineries that make orange wines are very small, with the direct involvement of the owner in the entire grapegrowing and winemaking process. And all practice sustainability in their entire production process. Plavinci Winery will present three wines in Verona (and later in Izola): Good boy Bruno, our famous semi-dry organic Pét Nat made from Tamyanika grape; Selena, still dry organic wine, also made from Tamyanika grape; and Ćilibar, still dry organic wine made from Panonia grape. While Good boy Bruno and Selena are obviously orange wines, having been macerated for almost a week, Ćilibar is very pale, with only two days of maceration, and could easily pass as a white wine, save for the characteristic taste of prolonged skin contact.