I made my first orange wine way back in 1980. I was frustrated by a couple of UCD Enology professors, when asked why white wines were made with only minimal skin contact rather than fermentation on the skins like red wines, said that they would be bad with no real explanation as to why. I knew that historically wines were made from grapes with little regard to the color in the skins. Things like refrigeration and fashion came much later. Since I couldn't get any satisfactory answer, I decided to find out myself why it supposedly couldn't be done successfully. The first one was made from chardonnay grapes from Winery Lake Vineyard in Carneros, which happened to be the most expensive grapes in the state at the time. I called the wine Gonzo as a friend who was in the wine business at the time and who happened to be a major fan of Hunter S. Thompson, the king of Gonzo journalism, tasted it and said the wine was a wine version of Thompson's writing. I managed to prove 2 things to a bunch of people. First, that you could make successful wines this way and, I was either a mad genius or more probably simply mad!