Orange soda

Donati 2008 Malvasia dell’Emilia (Emilia-Romagna) – An orange wine that really is orange (most of them are in the beige/tan/brown spectrum), or perhaps we could get swanky and call it a lighter sort of burnt sienna. And: sparkling. So, the heavy tannic overlay of the orange genre is lightened not by the counterpoint of fruit, nor of acidity (a rare thing in the category in the best of cases), but by a gentle – and fading – fizz. It’s more distracting than present at the moment, and it’s not going to do anything but fade, but it’s necessary for the wine’s tenuous grip on balance, which is falling deeper into a cider-esque hole with each passing month. It’s more an intellectual pleasure than a sensory one, because it pairs some extremes of technique with a relentlessly uncompromising weirdness, but as someone who enjoys this particular thought experiment I still quite enjoy it. That said, there are many who would not allow that this is “wine” any longer, based on its taste rather than its origin, and I would have sympathy for that opinion. But wine it is, nonetheless, and if you own any, you should drink it. (10/11)