Let’s be honest here, orange wine is so-so on its own. Luke warm at best. Right down the middle. Only trendy because it’s different and weird. Yeah, I said it, whatever. Cry two tears in a bucket. To be a little more nonpartisan I guess I can say there’s good and bad and mediocre in every category. For me, a couple of ounces of orange wine here and there is fine but more than a glass makes my mouth feel like I was being held hostage and tortured by being forcefed an overdressed salad. I’m probably pissing off some somms here. “But, but…” Shove it, nerds. From my end it’s obvious there’s been an orange wine renaissance of sorts over the last decade and there are some producers out there making great stuff, I’m not bashing all of it, I’m just having fun picking at most of it. I’m also an over forty dad and have no tattoos or piercings. I’m not “cool” on the outside…At all…Not even a little. But, I think we’ve all forgotten, it’s the inside that counts. My mother always told me that.

Now that I’ve got your attention, I must admit I do enjoy most orange wines in small quantities because they contain such a crazy level of different profiles. Yeah, I’m going full blown unreliable narrator this morning. You can keep reading if you want to. I like to rag on it because I can usually tell who will order it based on a plethora of different factors I’m able to discern and calculate in less than a second when someone sits down at the bar. I’ll give you a hint, there’s usually a ghostly pallor from avoiding the sun, a sort of malnourished look about them, a lack of energy from absence of nutrients, unwashed, brittle hair, and there must be tattoos. Yes, vegans are attracted to orange wine like flies to shit. I don’t know why, maybe they heard some false information like it contains all the essential amino acids. Hey, I’m sure the people working the meat counter at my local Whole Foods judge me. “Oh, here comes the annoying exhausted dad bod guy who will order shit loads of ground beef and want it all wrapped in individual pounds…”

I’ve tried wine syrups in the past to not much taste bud reception. Punch Drink barfed up an article about it several years back and I made a pinot noir syrup that we tinkered around with which ended up down the drain. Last year I made riesling syrup which was tasty but also took a ride down the porthole to oblivion. I don’t know. I always wrote wine syrups off as the many things I read in a Punch article that were either unnecessary or written by people that never bartended in their lives. Again, like anything, you’ve got to sift through the debris to find the bones, the femurs, the building blocks, the beams holding it all up. These online journals have to pump out relevant content or else become irrelevant. It’s a business and when you don’t know shit from shinola you’ve got to at least pretend.

What was I even talking about? Oh yeah, wine syrups and orange wine. Ok, well, orange wine, as you well know, isn’t made from oranges. The color is caused by allowing the skins and seeds of white grapes to sit with the juice, hence the term “skin contact” you’ve heard, along with an eye roll, from your server at some point. The flavor profiles of different orange wines obviously depends on the grapes, methods, pretty much everything but on the whole they differ from your garden variety whites and reds because they’re more often natural wines with no additives and they’re allowed to ferment and fester of their own accord which results in some pretty uncanny flavors in some cases and in other cases results in that off putting apple cider vinegar taste. The cool thing is they can be both bright and acidic like a white as well as tannic and robust like a red. The best of both worlds. My mama always told me you can’t ride two horses with one ass but in this case you can.

This is why orange wine makes a great syrup.

Any syrup with an additional acidic liquid component instead of water will just plain taste better in your cocktail as well as helping to water your drink down less because you won’t have to add quite as much of an additional acid like lemon or lime juice. At least in theory. So, in this case think lemon and lime sherbets, amazake syrups, and yes, in many conditions, orange wine or white wine syrups. Yes, the sugars and syrups addeth while the juices taketh away. It all depends on what you want to do with mouthfeel. Some cockatoos are fantastic being juicy (the cure), others because they have a milky and thick quality (Quato Lives, still miss this one).

Do it. Go equals parts orange wine and sugar. Do it, I dare you. Make a daiquiri with it, I double dog dare you.