Savoury style with gentle but present grip and a deep yellow fruit profile for contrast. Close your eyes and it's a red wine with white wine flavours

Oddly, orange food seems to go with orange wine. Salads based around pumpkin or carrot. Any tagine with saffron in it. Curries, especially with fresh curry leaf. Weird hey? Try it.

 👁 Pale amber, with slight haze
👃 White pepper, apricot, preserved lemon
👄 Pear, oolong tea, clay/earth, not overly tannic but closes out with a persistent grip on the finish

The Alto! Alto!! wines run deep with the spirit of people I have been inspired by and the magic moments in wine I want to try to re-create. No surprises that it was Matt who showed me the first orange wine that really blew me away (Occhipinti SP68) and inspired me to make a proper skin contact white. Matt also matched that wine to food so well, it taught me that the style can work as a pairing in ways which white, pink, red or fizzy never can.

There seems to be two main camps of skin-contact whites: really good and really expensive or really delicious, relatively simple/fruity and inexpensive. I wanted to make one that was really good AND inexpensive! To avoid making the hyper-fruited tropicale styles that you regularly see out there from the very start (2015 Alto! Alto!! bianco) I’ve been a believer that if you’re going to do extended skin maceration with white varieties you might as well do it properly. From 30 days in 2015 it’s now generally 180 to 220 days depending on the season and I think the wine is appropriately relaxed and complete after its’ long rest on skins, seeds and lees.