If every journey is a spiritual search in disguise, then a trip to Georgian wine country is a pilgrimage, and I should admit up front that I didn’t expect to come home talking about the soul of wine. Soul is a word I’d normally keep for music, and I’m a little wary of anyone who uses it about something that comes in a bottle, yet here we are.
Some context helps. Since the financial crisis of 2008, the wine world has drifted into two camps, with wine as a luxury good on one side and organic and natural wine on the other. Georgia came back into view at exactly the right moment, as its re-emergence as an independent country, with wine and especially amber wine at the heart of its identity, coincided with the natural wine movement taking off over here.
You won’t be in Georgia long before someone reminds you that it has the oldest evidence of winemaking yet found, in an 8,000-year-old village near Tbilisi, and that this makes it a country with 8,000 vintages. Its signature style is what we’d call orange wine, made from white grapes left on their skins, which the Georgians call amber wine and make in clay vessels called qvevri, buried in the ground.
A country with nowhere to hide
On our first night, driving through Kutaisi after midnight in the green fluorescent glow of the minibus, our guide suddenly became animated and pointed out the new police stations, which, it turned out, were made of glass. After the Rose Revolution of 2003, Georgia set about tackling police corruption by disbanding the notoriously corrupt traffic police and starting again with new recruits of spotless reputation. The glass buildings went with them, so the public could see into the offices and the officers could see each other, which left nowhere to hide and nowhere to take a bribe.
It struck me as a fitting metaphor for qvevri wine, which has nowhere to hide either. Whatever goes into the qvevri is the true state of the vintage, with nothing added and usually no filtering at the end. The grapes go in with their skins and often their stems, ripe or not, and stay there for around six months, so if the tannins aren’t perfectly ripe, they come out harsh and prickly. You can’t predict the result, except that it won’t be a compromise, and as Andrew Jefford has put it, it can be “a kind of punk.”
Some of the places I visited reminded me of the early days of home brewing in the late 1970s, since almost everyone in Georgia seems to make wine. In a country that has spent much of its history under one occupier or another, winemaking has been passed down carefully through families and villages, and for long stretches the only place people could speak freely was around the dinner table, with their own wine and a toast of Gaumarjos!, which means “to your victory.”
What comes out of a qvevri isn’t always comfortable to taste, but it is always truthful to what went in, and there’s no oak to cover up any flaws.
The big wineries
It would be easy to visit the bulk wineries Georgia inherited from the Soviet era and dismiss them as the opposite of all this, commercially minded and built for volume, but I think that would be too simple. What was once “Production Unit No. 2” is now a valuable piece of winemaking infrastructure, and I found the large producers offered their own fascinating view of the region and of how Georgia is turning its Soviet legacy into something useful for the future.
Russia’s embargo on Georgian wine, which ran from 2006 to 2013, cut the country off from its traditional market, one that had always valued quantity over quality. Trying to win over new customers across Europe and Asia meant Georgia could no longer be complacent about quality, and the large wineries also provide jobs for local people who carry generations of knowledge about picking grapes, making wine and drinking it.
The future of the qvevri
All the same, the small qvevri producer is the real star of Georgian wine. Having sat through a meet-and-greet with producers and tasted close to 100 wines, I came away feeling that Georgia is both an old and a new wine country, and that the winemakers experimenting with qvevri are the ones pushing it forward.
I’ll be honest, though, and say that after a while I wanted more focus on the quality coming out of the vineyard. So much of Georgia’s reputation rests on the qvevri, and during that day of tasting, with many of the wines unfinished or fizzy, there came a point when I put down my pen and simply listened to the winemakers, or their sons and daughters, talk. After so much tradition, the question I wanted to ask was how they saw the next 8,000 vintages.
Georgian winemaking has already inspired skin-contact wine well beyond its borders, from Italian producers such as Gravner and Radikon to Australia, where, according to winemaker Lado Uzunashvili, 25 qvevri were shipped over in the past year. Australia even has its own clone of Saperavi, collected in Georgia before phylloxera and brought over via UC Davis in the 1950s.
Final thoughts
If a trip to Georgia is a wine pilgrimage, then every step along the wine route means something to the pilgrim, all the more so when the road gets difficult. Amber wine has nowhere to hide, and I suspect it’s the resilience of the Georgian people that will carry their wine industry forward, as it has so much else in their renewed country. Georgia has an extraordinary inheritance of wine knowledge and is one of the most intriguing wine countries I’ve been lucky enough to visit, and it will stay with me for a long time. My thanks to Wines of Georgia for the trip.
For Georgia’s wine regions and grapes, see the companion post, Georgian Grapes and Wines, Organised by Region.
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