Weekend Sommelier: What colour is wine?

By Kevin Legg on April 4, 2026.

“Red or white?”

That has to be the most common question asked in wine chat everywhere.

It’s the server with a tray of pre-poured glasses: “excuse me, red or white?”; it’s the colleague who was delegated to pick wine at team dinner “what’s everyone feel like – red or white?”; or the wine store expert steering a gift-buyer “let me see … does your gift-getter like red or white?”

If the answer doesn’t completely solve the puzzle, it cuts it in half. And yet, it might be the least accurate way of describing an essential aspect of wine – its colour.

Colour in wine matters a great deal to those who spend a lot of time with it. Holding it up to the light and squinting she says, “It has a brickish hue – or perhaps russet…” and so on.

But is there really all that much variety in the colour? Aren’t all red wines kind of “red wine red” and all the white wines yellowish? But that is not the way colour works in wine. It’s not paint-box colours, but still a wide, and well-charted spectrum. Consider these long-established wine colours:

Yellow: even though virtually all “white wines” are shades of yellow, “yellow wine” refers to a particularly delightful variety of wine from an area in France called Jura: “Vin Jaune.” The pleasant golden colour is attributed to the grape itself (Savagnin), time in wood barrels and deliberate exposure to fungus. It is an unforgettable, and delicious type of wine.

Pink is the nickname given to the famous rose category – found in sweet or dry, sparkling or still wines. It may surprise you that rose is not made from mixing white and red wines, but rather from pressing dark-skinned grapes lightly, or pulling the crushed skins out earlier from the mash to leave only a little pigment. While they can be found everywhere, ask your local shop for a rose from Provence to get started.

Green: Portugal has a region named Vinho Verde or green wine region. This is made from blends of indigenous white grape varieties. As one humourist said: “Some are greenish yellow, and others are yellowish green.” The wines are light, fresh, low-alcohol, and slightly bubbly.

Green does double-duty in wine language, where it also refers to the tastes of vegetal, and “stemmy” tastes that appear even in red wines.

Orange wine is made by treating white grapes like black grapes – leaving the wine on the skins to ferment, extracting the grippy texture and pigment from the skins. With many bad examples and few very excellent ones, recommendations are key with this category – try something from Georgia, where wines have been made for 8,000 years.

Black: If you’ve seen wines that look like calligraphy ink it won’t surprise you to know that in Cahors (French Pyrenees) they make wines so thick they have earned the nickname “black wines.”

They are made primarily from the Malbec grape – which you will likely have seen in its lighter mood in Argentinian offerings. But try Cahors if you want to see just how dark they can go. This might have been Homer’s idea of the “wine dark sea.” Brooding and moody.

We can’t leave without a few honourable mentions for 1) purple – which describes many young red wines – but is the signature of Beaujolais’s gamay wines produced without pressing. Also 2) “silver” wines which have a sparkling clarity that looks like glinting glass (some Rieslings or Chablis chardonnays can be silver). Then there’s 3) Pinot Gris (grigio) – the grey grape as the name denotes, and 4) Blanc de noirs or white-from-black wines, where white wine is drawn from black grapes pressed lightly.

All this adds up to a marvellous range of colour not only in the glass, but in its descriptions, regions and historical roots. This is an easy way to explore and experiment with wine; enjoy!

Kevin Legg is a wine enthusiast out of Lethbridge with extensive training, travel and knowledge surround the subject