AS kept his promise and brought the first edition of Academia Purcari to the table — three of the four bottles. One was an orange Viorica — a white wine made like a red. We looked into the glass, we tasted, and we asked exactly the right question.
This time it wasn't a blind tasting. It was a promise kept: AS had finally brought the first edition of Academia Purcari — the amphora series, the one with old-map labels. Three of the four bottles: two reds and a third that looked like white, but behaved nothing like it.
Here is how it went.
AS explained, glass in hand. Orange wine has nothing to do with oranges. It's a white wine made like a red: with classic whites, after pressing, the skins are separated quickly from the must. With orange, the must stays days, weeks, sometimes months in contact with the skins — exactly like reds.
From there come the golden-amber color, the tannins, the structure, the aromas of tea, nuts, dried herbs, candied fruit. You look into the glass and you see white wine. You taste it and you get something that behaves almost like a red. For a first-timer, it's startling.
A few years ago, Moldova had a small orange-wine boom. It appeared at several wineries, tastings were held. But the wider public didn't get it — too different for the Sauvignon Blanc lover, too little red for the Cabernet one. Many projects stayed experiments. The winemakers came a few years ahead of the consumer. And that's perfectly normal.
„Orange wine is a white wine made like a red. That's it. The rest is misunderstanding."
„I look into the glass — white. I taste it — it's almost red. It took me two minutes to place it in my head."
„Wait… what am I drinking right now?"
Around the second bottle, AS stopped tasting and started thinking out loud. If a project is called "Academia", people expect more than a winemaking technology. They expect learning, experiment, know-how transfer. The conversation grew so large it no longer fit into a dispatch.
„A candle loses none of its light when it lights another candle. The room only grows brighter."
AS developed the idea into a separate essay — about how Academia could be a laboratory, a scholarship, a promise for all of Moldovan winemaking.