Plutonium is natural; orange is a town.

Orange and natural wines are on the rise internationally.

Presuming such tinctures are not from Orange, and contain no plutonium, I recently wrote of my longstanding theory that wine production, sale and marketing, and especially its packaging, shares a lot with the popular music business. Having been a music critic before I took my very deep dive into wine, I’ve often marvelled at the parallels.

My article likened the current wave of very old-fashioned natural or orange wines to the minimalist reactionary punk movement of the mid-’70s. That piece raised a prickly frisson around the wine business, mainly because I confused orange with natural.

This was done partly out of ignorance – I have a lot to learn – but partly out of mischief.

While underground movements tend to be paranoid and secretive, those that depend upon the actual sales of an item must eventually be governed by the law, or at least conform to sufficient fashion templates to be recognised enough to be saleable.

My colleague Jeremy Pringle, of the excellent Wine Will Eat Itself blog, winced reasonably at my music/wine analogy on the grounds of music categories being unfortunate intrusions in what should naturally be a fluid soundscape.

But if you were one of the many premium winemakers at Orange, you’d surely prefer other makers who used your region’s name to make clear they were talking of colour, not place. And if you were a consumer, you’d like to know the natural status stopped short of permitting the inclusion of plutonium.

With foodstuffs, consumers are constantly demanding more accurate descriptive labelling, if only to discover which evils or delights they’re about to put inside their bodies.

Stuart Knox, the award-winning proprietor and “bottle-stroker” (his term) of the popular Sydney wine bar Fix St James waded in on Twitter.

“Oh dear, it appears @whiteswine has gone all Wine Australia on us and confused natural wine with orange wine,” he responded.

“Being that I’m a sommelier I’m well aware that @whiteswine has complete disdain for me and generally any sommelier’s opinions,” he continued. “There again, as far as I can actually see, @whiteswine is a blog that is built around disdain for most if not all of the wine trade.”

Permit me here to make a clarification of my own. @whiteswine is my Twitter handle; my blog is called DRINKSTER.

While he missed making that distinction, Stuart settled sufficiently to make one clarification in our late-night skirmish. He seemed to agree that natural wine is like the punk movement.

“However,” he asserted, “if perhaps we are talking orange/amber wine then perhaps its spiritual home is Georgia … I’m sick of the mistaking of orange and natural.”

Believing that these sorts of wines are here to stay – they’re basically the types of wine that were made for millennia before the modern industrialisation of wine-making – I presumed that if a dude like me is confused, then the poor old punter must be even more so.

After that interchange, I invited three highly respected experts to clarify this murk.

The first was Max Allen, wine critic on the Weekend Australian. Max has been a long-time evangelist, preaching the gospel of wines which are made without so much of the chemical and physical interference and manipulation inherent in modern refinery wine.

“Orange is a description of a style of wine,” he wrote with typical acuity. “Like sparkling or rosé, it refers to a technique. Natural is a philosophy, an approach, an ideology.”

Julian Castagna is a Beechworth winemaker who made the first Australian biodynamic wines to blow me away. When I did my annual Top 100 tastings in The Advertiser around the turn of the last millennium, over three years he consecutively entered different wines that scored higher than the thousands of others I tasted in those enormous blind exercises.

One of those winners of my Wine of the Year was a rosé. I couldn’t believe what I’d done. Or what Julian had achieved. But in the years since, his Castagna wines have repeatedly dazzled and delighted me. And thousands of others, not the least his rivals.

Julian opened the door for this back-to-basics revolution.

“Natural is how we make wine; how we have made it from the very beginning,” he wrote. “It’s wine that speaks of the land from where it came, made without artefacts.

“I doubt, though, whether that is what is generally understood by the word. I guess most people understand it to mean wine without sulphur dioxide. Thus the confusion.

“Orange, I understand to mean wine made with white grapes fermented on skins,” he continued. “It is, I think, simply a descriptive term. How orange in colour it is will depend on how hot the fermentation got, but the colour for me is less important than the phenolic structure which the skins impart to the wine.”

Then I invited comment from my landlord, the Yangarra winemaker Peter Fraser. Not only is he close – the winery’s just outside my kitchen window – but he’s been making some delicious wines which could seem to fit a template that vaguely approximates either of the murky natural or orange appellations.

“My understanding of natural winemaking (maybe we should call it ‘educated minimalist’),” Peter wrote, “is to enhance and guide natural systems of growing and fermenting.”

Then he added a telling sequitur: “If grape juice is allowed to ferment naturally and is left in a complete natural state, it will turn to vinegar.

“Orange wine is a unique style of wine,” he expounded. “I have two experiences of orange wine. The first was being poured 150ml in a large burgundy glass at super hipster wine bar, and while I found the flavours and texture interesting, I struggled to drink more than 30ml of the glass, and was left looking for the closest pot plant so as not offend the sommelier.

“The second was with sommelier Laine Kerrison of Rococo’s of Noosa, who poured us all a small glass of Radikon (unfortunately I do not remember the variety or vintage) and paired it with fresh oysters with a vinaigrette dressing. It was a sublime gastronomic experience. It was only recently I realised that while Laine had excelled as a sommelier in heightening that food and wine experience, these wines are maybe not designed for people sitting at a wine bar slurping big over-sized glasses, as we customarily do with most wines.

“More like sherries and other fortified wines, they’re designed to be drunk in small amounts as gastronomic experiences. I believe many producers and hipster wine bars are missing this critical point!

“But then there is the understanding that orange wines are white wines that have spent some maceration time in contact with the grape skins. This definition I believe falls very short, and needs much better clarification.”

So there. If this clarification is to come from the producers, at least we’ve started the discussion. But, as with other foodstuffs, like genetically-modified and heavily preserved stuff, there are those, like me, who would like a slightly faster clarification than a long rambling spat is likely to produce.

Which would leave the door open for Wine Australia to impose its own appellation. Having just morphed into the Australian Wine and Grape Authority, it must surely be willing to thoughtfully consider changes to other nomenclatures, non?

To read the extensive comments of Max Allen, Julian Castagna and Peter Fraser in full, check DRINKSTER.