‘Every Georgian wants to make wine,’ Sandro Kurdadze tells me when I ask what inspired his father to plant grapes. Spend any time in this extraordinary, fertile country and you realise the answer was obvious.
Kurdadze, a slightly built classical philosophy graduate with fluent English and comprehensive knowledge of Georgian wine, might be emblematic of the new Georgia. He’s winemaker at Papari Valley in the Kakheti region, where his parents made the first vintage in 2015. They combine methods thousands of years old with modern techniques. For example: their qvevri – the huge clay vessels that have been used here since the Pharaohs ruled Egypt – are arranged in a radical terracing system that allows the wines to be moved by gravity instead of syphoning. This ‘maximally expresses the idiosyncrasy of the terroir,’ he says.
Georgians love their country’s history but are not in any way enslaved to it
Georgians like to say ‘Georgia is wine and wine is Georgia’. And just as wine informs the culture, so does history. I can’t think of any people so aware of their ancestry. There are fermentation vessels 8,000 years old in the museum at Tbilisi. Archaeologists are dating a fireplace recently discovered, thought to be the oldest sign of humanity’s use of fire. ‘If it’s proven, it will be another advantage for us’ says our guide Maka Tarashvili with a smile.
What is fascinating about Georgian wine, however, is the rate at which it is modernising. Georgians love their country’s history but are not in any way enslaved to it. While wine producers are aware of the marketing opportunities of the qvevri, they are equally in tune with the needs of a 21st-century consumer – in Oslo, say, or Warsaw.
Andria Mirianashvili, wearing a Nike hoodie with the words ‘Keep your motor running’ on the back, is standing in his qvevri cellar. Along with his sister Anna, he runs Chelti, the winery founded by his father 25 years ago. In many ways it’s typical of the modern Georgian operation. The family lost their land under the Soviets; in 2000, Giorgi Mirianashvili began buying up vineland, reviving the old cellars (neglected by the Soviets), installing stainless steel tanks and busily brokering export contracts (they now sell to 20 countries). ‘We’re using technology that is 8,000 years old,’ Andria said. But while the methods may be old, the wines he’s producing are geared to a modern audience: he won’t ferment with stems, for example, which can make the wine seem rustic. ‘Older Georgians love the heavier style but the younger generation prefer more balance, so no stems for the export wines.’
Like Kurdadze at Papari Valley, other producers are adapting qvevri to respond to the vagaries of modern winemaking. At Shilda, whose winemaker Temo Kortava trained at New Zealand’s Oyster Bay, the vessels are equipped with cooling pipes. ‘All our fermentations are controlled,’ he says.
A bracing lack of sentimentality is part of the Georgian attitude to qvevri. These splendid vessels (a man can stand with outstretched arms in the biggest) are handmade and wood-fired. Waiting lists for the best qvevri artisans are getting longer and longer. A few years ago, a young inventor found a way of 3D printing a qvevri. He managed to make a 100-litre example but was killed in a car crash before he could scale up his method. Several producers I spoke to would have no qualms about using machine-made and electric kiln-fired qvevri if they were available.
What is certain is that qvevri wines sell. When Château Mukhrani – a half-million-bottle producer in a 19th-century château, complete with the original cellars, in the Kartli region of central Georgia – was revived in 2000, fermentation and ageing was to be entirely oak and stainless steel. But it soon became apparent that ‘UK consumers aren’t interested in a Georgian wine if it’s not made in qvevri,’ CEO and winemaker Patrick Honnef – who is German – said. He added that there’s still work to do, noting that ‘we might go to a natural wine fair in Washington DC and still see only one or two Georgian wines. They can be rough. We have to define how to make a qvevri wine.’
While there are still Georgian producers whose idea of a ‘natural wine’ is something dismayingly astringent, many are crafting amber wines (powerful tannic whites born of months of skin contact in qvevri) that retain their edge while a having a wide appeal. The Rkatsiteli from Papari Valley, for example, spends three months on skins, which results in a white wine of fine tannic heft and a seductive jasmine-scented palate. There are few places it could come from but Georgia.
Some winemakers prefer to discuss anything but winemaking. An evening’s conversation with Giorgi Solomnishvili in an upstairs room smelling of wood and polish, cluttered with his collections – of English silver and English furniture, books and bric-a-brac from every century – swerved between Orwell’s 1984, Coca-Cola, haikus and Motorola, accompanied by wines of sublime precision and concentration. Black-bearded, round as a cherub, his talk attained the quality of poetry. Like many Georgians he has the gift of complication. You might ask, ‘How many hectares do you own?’ to be met with a patient smile and a shake of the head: how would he know? His #22 Saperavi honours his father, who died very young. The figure 2022, rendered a certain way in Georgian script, can look like the word ‘mama’, which means ‘father’. ‘This is the juice of my heart,’ Solomnishvili says. ‘I make this wine from my past.’ His talk maybe gnomic but with exports thriving for the 20,000 bottles he makes a year, there’s nothing wrong with his business sense.
Producers are adapting qvevri to respond to the vagaries of modern winemaking
There are over 500 grape varieties native to Georgia. No wonder they’re driven to make wine. They are equally driven to sell it and know their market. Misha Dolidze and a group of friends, all doctors who have worked abroad, from Nottingham to the Democratic Republic of Congo, founded Casreli in 2014. In the cellar there are yellow Post-it notes on the lids of the qvevri, and a sticker on the wall saying ‘Russia is occupant!’. Dolidze exports 60% of his wine and has a clutch of international awards (the trophies are dustily piled on a palette in the corner). This is precision natural winemaking: no filtration, no fining, natural yeast. The wines are beautifully poised and powerful.
Like Château Mukhrani, which is owned by the Swedish adventurer and businessman Frederik Paulsen, Dolidze and his partners represent the blossoming of serious investment in Georgia. They also speak to a culture of glorious amateurism. ‘We don’t have a professional bias, so we play around a lot,’ Dolidze says. As so often in Georgia, he appears perfectly insouciant while at the same time discoursing with fluent expertise on the soils of his different plots, the science of qvevri fermentation; and exporting 60% of his 10,000-bottle production to the US, the Netherlands, Japan and some to the UK.
Despite a chaotic political situation – not to mention a very dangerous neighbour – this is a relentlessly outward-looking country. ‘Georgia’s always been like that,’ says Robert Parsons, a TV journalist who has been coming here since the early 1980s – he makes a few hundred cases of wine near Telavi in Kakheti. ‘They’re at the crossroads of different civilizations, east and west; they’re always travelling and they have very wide horizons.’
Our last visit is to Teliani Valley, a very smart winery with a clutch of international medals, including five from the IWSC. They’ve got an interesting non-profit project called the Teliani Collection, which invites artisan winemakers to produce special cuvées that the winery bottles and markets to nine countries worldwide. Teliani’s mission statement, emblazoned on its homepage: ‘Making the world a little more Georgian’.
