Are you looking for a bottle to impress your hipster cousin AND your conservative mother-in-law at your next family gathering? Perhaps something to pair with an eclectic Easter buffet complete with the annual spiral cut ham, deviled eggs, and well-meaning, but slightly awkward small talk?

Well, I have just the thing.

It’s a serious wine that will grab everyone's attention. With complexity, multiple chapters to every sip, and flavors that linger long after you’ve finished the last drop, you’ll think to yourself, "What is this!?"

This orange wine from Italy is weighted, slightly tannic, satisfyingly salty, and it has just the right amount of stone fruit to create a perfectly balanced and integrated treat for your senses. It’s complex enough to stand in for your pre-dinner cocktail, but it would also pair beautifully with:

~ Chicken with lemons and spicy spring onions
~ Chicken with schmaltzy rice and kale
~ Balsamic peach pork chops with feta and basil
~ Roasted salmon with citrus salsa verde
~ Ottolenghi’s pasta and zucchini salad
~ An Easter buffet

White, red, rosé, and orange? Yep, there’s a fourth color to consider for your glass. While it’s certainly not new in the history of winemaking, it’s a relatively recent wine trend that deserves to stick around.

You can think of orange wine as the opposite of rosé in terms of production. Orange wines are made by producing wine from white grapes like you would a red wine, with deliberate contact between the juice and the skins to provide more body, tannins, and complexity to the finished wine. (Rosé, by contrast, is made by producing wine from red grapes like you would a white wine, with minimal grape skin contact with the juice.)

Skin contact white wines can be made with any white wine grape and use nearly any winemaking techniques, meaning that the final product can range wildly in your glass. So while it’s not uncommon to hear people say that they either love or hate orange wines, that’s a bold blanket statement to make considering the wide range of styles that exist today.

This particular bottle comes from the Antonelli estate in the Umbrian region of Italy and is made from the local Trebbiano Spoletino grape. Now, if you’re like me and thought, “Oh sure, I know about Trebbiano,” this is confusingly not that Trebbiano. It turns out that there are multiple Trebbiano grapes throughout Italy that share absolutely no genetic relation. (Italian wine can be so confusing!) Trebbiano Spoletino is a native of Umbria and differs from other Trebbianos with its perfume of aromatic herbs and a particularly citrusy finish.

And finally, it’s worth sharing that this estate has been owned and operated by the same family - the Antonelli’s - since the 1880s. According to the family, all the wines are produced exclusively from the estate’s organically grown grapes in order to offer a product "whose potential, characteristics, and quality can be controlled and evaluated at every phase of production."

Antonelli San Marco's estate is focused on providing wines that "stylistically represent authenticity and harmony, and drinkability and elegance, rather than blunt power” - which is an approach that I'll happily raise a glass to!

Photos of the winery and producers are courtesy of Chambers and Chambers Wine Merchants.

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