2025 was the year orange wine died in the Bay Area
Bahman Safari, owner of Bar Bibi, holds a glass of orange wine. Popular just a few years ago, orange wine sales have fallen off a cliff, Safari said. (Jana Ašenbrennerová/For the S.F. Chronicle)
When Bahman Safari was preparing to open his new wine bar, Bar Bibi, this summer, he made sure to stock up on orange wine. It had been wildly popular at Habibi Bar, the popup he'd run since 2020. "A couple years ago, it became clear that orange wine was the thing you had to have," Safari said.
By the time Bar Bibi opened in August, something had shifted. Orange wine - made by macerating white grapes with their skins, creating something darker and more tannic than a traditional white wine - was not selling. The zeitgeist had moved on decisively to something else: the chilled red. "Whatever orange wine was," Safari said, "chilled red had taken over."
The waning demand for orange wine, and the ascendancy of chilled reds, can tell us a lot about the state of the Bay Area's wine scene - in particular its natural wine scene - in 2025. If orange wine was once shorthand for "natty wine," a signifier for the stereotype of a wine that tastes like kombucha, Bay Area drinkers seem to be moving on from the wilder end of the flavor spectrum. It's not that they're rejecting natural wine, which can encompass a wide range of styles made with minimal intervention, but that they're rejecting natural wine's funkiest expressions.
Even the most devoted natural wine temples are gravitating toward "wines that are stable and on the classic side of things," said Dominique Henderson, owner of Bar Gemini in the Mission. "During the natural wine rush a lot of people were burned by bad actors, or rather bad winemakers," turned off by wines that reeked of flaws like mouse, volatile acidity or excessive brettanomyces (a spoilage yeast that can produce a barnyard flavor).
Natural wine-focused Bar Gemini has gravitated away from funky expressions and toward "wines that are stable and on the classic side of things," said owner Dominique Henderson. (Amaya Edwards/S.F. Chronicle)
Chilled red, though also a natural wine signifier of sorts, has come to connote something a little less obviously "natty" than orange wine did. The chilled-red craze became so pervasive this year that wine bar operators are still trying to make sense of it. Ten of them interviewed for this article said it was their best-selling category by far.
"That's the wave that everyone's riding on," said Eric Salveson, wine buyer at Millay in San Francisco. "We order twice to three times as much of our chilled red offering as any other wine by the glass."
Wine trends are always in flux. Before the orange wine boom, there was the rosé craze, notoriously resulting in shortages in the Hamptons, a slew of viral memes and a rhyme-heavy merch business. (Rosé All Day. Yes Way Rosé. Drink Pink.) That craze has long since subsided; Bar Gemini sells so little rosé, even on hot days, that Henderson barely stocks it. "Orange wine cannibalized rosé sales, and now chilled red is cannibalizing orange wine sales," Safari said.
Pink yielded to orange around the time in the late 2010s that natural wine was beginning to surge. Orange wines - sometimes called skin-contact wines, or macerated whites - became a handy way for someone who was new to natural wine, and eager to dabble in its unconventionality, to reliably get what they wanted without needing to be schooled in specific producers or regions.
Orange wines at Bar Bibi, which still stocks the category despite its declining sales. (Jana Ašenbrennerová/For the S.F. Chronicle)
"A lot of people were asking questions about orange wine because they were learning about wine, period," said Simi Grewal, co-owner of Decant, a bar and shop with locations in San Francisco and Napa. Up until this year, when it seemed like the quintessential gateway wine, she kept 15-20 different orange wines in the store. Since sales of it have fallen off in the last 7-8 months, however, she's down to five.
At Decant's Napa location, "selling orange wine is like pulling teeth," co-owner Cara Patricia said. Customers still request a few sought-after examples by name - from the producers Cos, Gravner and Paolo Bea - "but if it's just run-of-the-mill orange wine that looks like a creamsicle in a clear glass, nobody cares anymore."
Patricia believes that many drinkers got burned on bad orange wine that smelled like feet. "Think about how extreme facial piercings got in the '90s," she said. "It went from people having their nose pierced, maybe their septum, maybe their cheeks, to all of a sudden people putting devil horns under their skin. It got so far to the extreme, the pendulum swung so far, that people were like, it's not even cool anymore."
Owner Stuart Brioza behind the counter at the Anchovy Bar. The restaurant, along with its sister establishments State Bird Provisions and the Progress, is selling less orange wine than it used to. (Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle)
Even when it wasn't offensive, a lot of orange wine started to just taste the same. "Many examples don't have an identity," said Adam Robins, beverage director for State Bird Provisions, the Progress and the Anchovy Bar. Those winemakers, in his opinion, are blending random grapes together without much thought for how they'll harmonize. "A lot of these wines have what I call the ‘Orangina' effect: highly aromatic, juicy, dry and interesting on the first sip," Robins said. "But I don't want to drink a whole glass of it or certainly not a bottle."
As it evolved from a curious novelty to a tired has-been, orange wine became a scapegoat for all of natural wine's perceived evils, the epitome of the "kombucha" cliche. "The orange-wine fad became an irresistible assault on pleasure," Troy Patterson wrote in the New Yorker: It was fashionable to be seen with a glass of it, but drinking the stuff is "a test of stamina," he said, citing a wine's "astringent sizzle, with undertones of acid reflux." It's "redolent of barnyard regret," according to Byron Houdayer in a Vanity Fair piece from October.
These critiques, rendered as broadly as they were, are unfair. Like rosé and chilled red, orange wine is a vast category, potentially encompassing wine's full stylistic spectrum. The Bay Area still contains many wine bars that embrace the funky end of natural wine, and orange wine hotspots remain. At the Punchdown, which has bars in Oakland and Sebastopol, skin-contact wines are still going strong, to the point where owner D.C. Looney offers three orange wines by the glass and only two whites.
At the San Francisco bars Bodega, Key Klub and Celeste, sales of one particular orange wine went bonkers this fall. The bars' co-owner, Paria Sedigh, collaborated with East Bay winery Les Lunes on a house orange wine incorporating the grapes Ribolla Gialla, Chenin Blanc, Picpoul, Orange Muscat, Grenache Blanc and Chardonnay. It sold twice as much as any other glass pour, including chilled reds, until the bars ran out of it in a month. "The surprising thing was people would come up to the bar and ask for the orange wine," Sedigh said. "I was shocked. How do you know? We don't post anything about it."
Key Klub co-owner Paria Sedigh, center, recently released an orange wine that sold out within a month at her bars. (Yalonda M. James/S.F. Chronicle)
Sedigh, who typically dislikes the funky aromas of orange wine, credits the bottling's popularity with the fact that it smelled fruity and floral, with none of the volatility that she has found in other examples. It subverted the orange wine stereotype that persists for many drinkers.
Whether or not a wine bar is still selling orange wines, none is immune from the supremacy of the chilled red. At Decant in San Francisco this summer, Grewal listed by the glass a dark-colored rosé from France's Tavel region. No one ordered it. Then she moved the wine on the menu, labeling it as a chilled red, "and it flew," she said. Regardless of what the wine actually is, there's something about those two words that's proving irresistible to Bay Area bargoers right now.
Any red wine, theoretically, could be served cold, but wine bar owners said they consider reds that are light in tannin, high in aromatics and abundant in fruit flavors as good candidates for chilling. A grippy Cabernet Sauvignon served at 45 degrees would taste unpleasantly bitter. It may not be a coincidence that colder temperatures tend to disguise certain faults or bacterial issues. A funky red, when chilled, will taste less funky.
