Orange Glou wine’s brick-and-mortar store opened in June 2021 on Broome Street, and the store has since become the Lower East Side’s hub for natural orange wine made by small, independent winemakers. Owned by renowned sommelier Doreen Winkler, Orange Glou is the orange wine store for all kinds of clientele. According to Winkler, patrons range from orange wine connoisseurs to amateurs, and the team’s goal has always been to educate people on what orange wine is and how to know when it’s good.
Orange wine is made with white grapes but made like red wine—that is, instead of separating the juice from the skin of the white grapes, as is done in modern wine-making practices, the grape juice and skins remain in contact for various periods of time. The result is orange wines that are different shades, flavors, and textures, depending on whether the grapes have macerated for hours, days, weeks, or months.
After spending years in fine dining working with more traditional wine and food pairings, Winkler, who was named one of America’s Top Sommeliers by Forbes in 2016, began to switch her focus onto natural wines. In curating a natural wine list for Aska in Brooklyn, she learned how versatile orange wines were. Her interest was piqued.
“With red and white [wine], you’re more limited with your choices,” Winkler said. “Pairing is so interesting when it comes to orange wine. It’s the answer for multiple techniques and pairings and complexities. It opened my eyes, and I really got into it.”
Thus, Orange Glou was born. The shop started as an online subscription, where subscribers received bottles of orange wine hand-picked by Doreen each month. When The New York Times covered the Orange Glou subscription box in 2019, business began to boom. But shortly thereafter, the pandemic hit.
“At first, I panicked,” Winkler said. “Then, there were a lot of people drinking wine. And it really picked up.”
The pandemic helped Orange Glou continue toward success, leading to requests to virtual events, bulk orders, and simply more than an online shop could handle, so Winkler went brick-and-mortar in 2021.
A year later, Winkler created the Orange Glou Wine Fair, a premium wine-tasting event that highlights anywhere from 25 to 50 winemakers, each of whom brings four wines for attendees to taste. Happening this year on October 26, the wine fair is expanding to more than 200 wines and is focusing on wines from Central Europe and the Republic of Georgia, where orange wine originated.
“It’s kind of like a little wonderland,” Winkler said. “You come in, and you get a pamphlet, and you go from table to table in the order it tells you, because there’s an agenda for how to taste the wines.”
Everything about the wine fair is expertly curated by Winkler, who personally invites each winemaker and hand selects what is going to be tasted at the events. It’s a particular curation process that she claims to be very strict about. In fact, there are a set of criteria that the wines must meet in order to be included in her fair, all of which aim to keep the wines natural, organic, and coming from small-scale producers.
Tickets for the Orange Glou wine fair go on sale on September 15 and can be purchased here: https://www.orangegloufair.com/.
The Orange Glou wine shop is open Wednesday through Sunday and conducts free tastings Friday from 6 to 8 p.m.
