This Company Wants To Ship You Small-Batch Orange Wine

Orange wine is having a moment. The ancient, once osburce wines have been popping up everywhere from wine bars to supermarket aisles over the past few years and now there’s a wine subscription service dedicated to orange wines.

Natural wine sommelier, Doreen Winkler, recently launched Orange Glou, a NYC pop up wine bar devoted solely to orange wines, and monthly wine subscription service available nationwide to customers in states that allow wine shipments (excludes Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia). Priced at $105 per month (3-bottle subscription) or $195 per month (6-bottle subscription), the Orange Glou wine club seeks to set itself apart from the already crowded wine subscription market but offering a curated selection of new, rare and natural orange wines.

“Orange wine is very versatile, so many colors and textures. Some can be enjoyed now, some you lay away,” Winkler said. “Some are lighter, some are richer. It’s a great food-pairing wine that has many layers.”

A sommelier working with conventional wines at places throughout the U.S., Europe and Australia, Winkler fell in love with natural and orange wines when she joined forces with Chef Fredrik Berselius of Aska to build an all natural wine program back in 2013. 

Also known as skin contact wines, orange wines are made from white grapes but in a way typical for reds where the wines ferment with the grape skins for a period of time that can range from mere hours to weeks or more. They can vary in hue from pale to golden to very dark orange. While the style has only recently caught on among winemakers in Europe and the U.S., in Georgia, vintners have made wine that way for millennia.

According to Winkler, all of the wines she selects with either be biodynamic or organic and boxes will contain various expressions of orange wine including sparkling.

“I put in a lot of work into tasting and discovering new wines,” Winkler said. All I am really looking for is that it tastes good and that I’m always featuring different countries and styles in every subscription box. Lately, I’ve been impressed with beautiful wines from Czech Republic, Italy and Greece, but there are so many great winemakers producing orange wine all over the world, so you can expect a great variety in every box.” 

Orange Glou is Winkler’s way of sharing her passion for small-batch orange, natural wines with others while making it easier to sip a glass of a hard-to-find wine.