Most Red Wine Is Wearing a Costume. Saperavi Came as Itself.

Squeeze almost any red grape and the juice runs clear. The color in your glass comes from the skins, so the red in nearly every red wine you've poured is, quite literally, a costume. A few grapes don't bother with one, because their flesh is red all the way through. The one to open this Halloween is Saperavi.

A white wine in a red coat

Cut a Cabernet Sauvignon grape in half and the juice inside is clear. The same goes for Merlot, Pinot Noir, Grenache and nearly every red grape you know by name. The pigments that make red wine red, called anthocyanins, sit in the skin. A winemaker gets them into the wine by leaving the juice on its skins while it ferments, for days or for weeks.

So most red wine spends its first week in a dark tank, quietly getting into costume, with the dedication of the neighbor who started building a front-yard graveyard in the first week of September.

Who's dressed as what

Once you know the color is borrowed, the famous names start to look like party guests.

Pinot Noir goes to Champagne as a white wine. Pressed gently and quickly, its clear juice stays pale, and it ends up in some of the most expensive white wine in the world. A Champagne labeled blanc de noirs, "white from blacks," is made entirely from black grapes. The most celebrated red grape in Burgundy spends a good part of its career in Champagne dressed as a white wine, and gets through the whole evening without a single guest asking to see some ID.

Most rosé is the same red grape with the skins taken away early. A few hours of contact instead of days or weeks, and the wine comes out pink. It isn't a separate kind of grape.

Cabernet, Merlot and Syrah are the guests who went all in. Long soaks, deep color, every bit of it pulled from the skins.

The ones who came as themselves

A small family of grapes skips the whole business. They're called teinturiers, French for "dyer," and their flesh is red as well as their skin, so the juice comes out red the moment the grape is pressed.

The two most often bottled on their own are Saperavi, from Georgia, and Alicante Bouschet, which a Frenchman named Henri Bouschet bred in 1866 and which this site is more or less built around. The rest are mostly blending grapes, used in small amounts to deepen the color of wines that never mention them. The full field guide to teinturier grapes has the whole cast.

At a costume party, the guest who turns up as themselves is either the most relaxed person in the room or the most unsettling, and a grape that bleeds when you cut it has made its choice.

One honest caveat before anyone gets carried away: red flesh makes a wine darker, not better. Color is a fact about the grape, not a verdict on the bottle.

Why Saperavi gets the porch light

Saperavi, said sah-peh-RAH-veerecorded by Tamari Araviashvili, is Georgia's signature red grape. It makes wine that is nearly black, with high acidity and the structure to age, which is a better description of a Halloween wine than anything on a novelty label. The guide to Georgian wine covers where it grows and how it's made there.

The bottle in the box above comes from somewhere else: it's made in New York's Finger Lakes. Standing Stone Vineyards calls it a Teinturier Saperavi on the label, and the winery describes black and red fruit, lively acidity and a fine, gentle grip.

Honesty first: I haven't opened this one. I'm pointing you at it because it's a single-varietal Saperavi you can order online today, and because the grape is the right one for the night. It almost certainly won't reach your door by Saturday, though. For a bottle tonight, ask a local wine shop for a Georgian Saperavi. The availability record on this page shows which importers bring it into the country, and a good shop can often order one through its distributor.

A true ghost story, with a wine in it

Halloween asks for a ghost story. This one happens to be true.

In 1867, an excavation near Speyer, in what is now southwest Germany, opened a Roman tomb. Inside were two stone coffins, one holding a man and one a woman, and around them sixteen glass vessels left for the dead. Fifteen were broken or dry. One was still full.

It's a yellow-green bottle of about a liter and a half, with handles shaped like dolphins, sealed sometime around AD 325 to 350. Whoever filled it poured a thick layer of olive oil over the wine to keep the air out, then closed it with hot wax. It worked. After about 1,700 years in the dark, the liquid is still in there: a clear layer at the bottom and a resin-like mass above it. Analysis suggests at least part of it is wine, flavored with herbs.

Nobody has opened it. It sits in the Historical Museum of the Palatinate in Speyer, where it has always been displayed, and the museum has declined to open it even for research, because no one is sure what the air would do to it. According to reporting gathered by Atlas Obscura, some of the staff would rather not handle it at all. The curator said in 2011 that he had seen no change in the bottle in twenty-five years.

So the oldest bottle of wine in the world is still sealed, still wearing its layer of oil, still waiting for a glass that never comes. I'd leave it there too.

What to skip

Skip the candy pairing. Sugar makes a dry red taste thin and sour, so keep the candy corn by the door and open the Saperavi with dinner instead.

Skip any bottle you're buying for the skull on the label. The pun isn't the wine.

Skip pouring a good red into a cauldron of punch. Use something cheap for that, and save the Saperavi for the glass.

And skip the white tablecloth. A teinturier stains the way it was named to.