Austrian Skin-Contact Wines

Austria is one of the most modern, forward-thinking wine countries, with a commitment to quality which means they consistently deliver. Despite centuries of winemaking history, there’s a willingness to experiment with a new generation of producers learning from their parents and grandparents but prepared to do their own thing.

This was no more evident than in a virtual tasting I recently attended in which I sampled four skin-contact wines from Austria. The quality was remarkable, as was the variety of styles in just four, extremely food-friendly wines.

“Skin-Contact”

The term “orange wine” is widely used to describe any white wine made with skin contact. However, as this virtual tasting made clear, the term orange wine isn’t entirely helpful. As winemaker Christian Tschida half-jokingly said, his wine is made from grapes not from oranges. But, perhaps more seriously, a lot of skin-contact wine isn’t actually orange or amber in appearance and the four wines I tasted were all a gold colour.

Host Pascaline Lepeltier MS stressed that “skin-contact wines” is a much better and more accurate term, as it describes any wine that has received extended contact with the grapes’ skins regardless of appearance. Moreover, orange wines can only be made from grapes with pinkish skins (such as Pinot Gris), whereas a skin-contact wine can be made from any white variety.

Why Skin-Contact?

Pascaline Lepeltier revealed that her enthusiasm for skin-contact wines is because they make her think of wine in a completely different way, which made her have to come up with a new vocabulary to describe wine. I don’t necessarily think that’s true; we should always strive to have the imagination to talk about wine in as varied a way as possible. But her general point stands: in a sea of homogeneous winemaking, these wines do something different and shake us from any complacency we may have.

The wines, of course, must taste good and there must be a valid reason to make them. The practice of fermenting wines with the skins goes back centuries, when the skins would provide stability during a fermentation process that wasn’t fully understood. It wasn’t until the 1990s that the practice was revived by pioneers such as Gravner in north-east Italy, while one of the Austrian producers featured in the tasting, Pittnauer, made their first skin-contact wine in 1997.

But why actually do it? All of these wines were low in alcohol (12% or below) with high, vibrant acidity. Making the wine in contact with the skins gives weight, structure, and flavour, ensuring that it’s not just acidity and nothing else. And of course skin contact brings extra complexity, giving the wine a tannic texture other white wines just don’t have.

All the winemakers present at the tasting stressed that making wines this way emphasises rather than reduces expressions of terroir. A wine we tasted by Christoph Hoch, “Hollenberger,” comes from three different sites on the same hill which receive different amounts of skin contact. The site at the top of the hill is cooler and receives a short amount of skin contact, while the site at the bottom of the hill is warmer and on richer soils and receives a year’s worth of skin contact.

Tschida summed up the benefits of skin contact by saying that when he began making wine he would put the skins left over from the press into the compost pile; he discovered that the compost smelt better than the wine. That discovery caused him to experiment with skin contact, and over the last ten years he has made 24 experimental skin-contact wines, a method he is still perfecting. But he has found that the way he makes the wine — the length of skin contact, the blend of grapes — directly reflects the characteristics of the vintage, another example of how skin-contact wines express terroir.

I don’t think it’s easy to make a skin-contact wine, and a lot of things can go wrong. There’s a danger of oxidation, as well as macerating the wine too much and producing a heavy wine that tastes too much like grape skins. The winemakers in the tasting have all experimented a great deal — it’s taken them time to perfect their craft. However, when it’s done well skin contact produces wines with genuine complexity and the capacity to age, with the structure to pair with rich or spicy food dishes.

the wines

Christoph Hoch “Hollenberger” Grüner Veltliner Kremstal NV (✪✪✪✪)

Unusually, this is a non-vintage wine, as winemaker Chrisoph Hoch believes that blending different vintages together is a greater expression of terroir. Rather like champagne or sherry, winemaking isn’t dependent on vintage conditions; instead, the winemaker can craft a wine that reflects where it comes from. The wine comes from three different vintages and three different plots on the same hill, receiving different levels of skin contact. For all that, this was probably the funkiest of the four wines with a cider-like quality. Acidity is incredibly high — not a wine for the faint-hearted.

Jurtschitsch “Belle Naturelle” Grüner Veltliner Kamptal 2019 (✪✪✪✪✪)

This was a pretty, beautiful, delicate wine, with the spicy, peppery qualities associated with Grüner Veltliner. It showed how a wine relatively low in alcohol can still have weight and complexity thanks to the skin contact, which gives it a golden colour and a firm, gripping texture. A great introduction to skin-contact wine due to the combination of approachable delicacy and lightly tannic structure.

Tschida “Himmel auf Erden” Austria 2019 (✪✪✪✪✪✪)

A blend of Moskateller (Muscat) and Scheurebe, this is a superb, serious wine. From 2019, it’s still youthful but the tense structure and grainy texture make it clear that it can age for another three to five years at least. On one level, the wine is fun, fruity, and floral, but the combination of vibrant acidity, tannic texture, and depth of flavour made it unforgettably complex.

Pittnauer “Perfect Day” Austria 2019 (✪✪✪✪)

Pittnauer were the first Austrian producer to make skin-contact wine, back in 1997. This wine is from Moskateller, and has the variety’s tell-tale floral grapey aromatics — smelling this without being able to see it, one could guess that it’s a Moscato d’Asti. However, due to the skin contact, the palate is quite different: completely dry and quite tannic. Not quite in sync, but nevertheless an interesting wine.

The four wines showed the variety of styles skin-contact wines can produce, depending on site, grape variety, length of contact, and the winemaker’s philosophy. It makes it hard to pigeon-hole skin-contact wine, but there’s no doubt they cause the drinker to re-think their perceptions of white wine.