Kakheti, Georgia: The Caucasus Mountains rise above vineyards that have produced wine in buried clay vessels for 8,000 years.
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Iago Bitarishvili, founder of Iago’s Wine, steps into his marani — the Georgian word for wine cellar — and points to a clay vessel buried to its shoulders in the earth. It holds 2,000 liters of wine, sealed with a roll of wet clay pressed over glass, a technique unchanged for millennia. The vessel is called a qvevri, pronounced “kwev-ree,” and it is the oldest winemaking vessel in continuous use on earth. Standing in the cool, dim light of his Kartli region winery, it becomes clear that Georgian wine is not a trend. It is the original.
“Georgia is the only country that keeps this technology,” Bitarishvili says. “Eight thousand years. Never stopped. Never changed.”
He is not exaggerating. Archaeological evidence places winemaking in Georgia at roughly 6,000 BCE, making it the oldest continuous wine culture on earth — a fact recognized by UNESCO, which lists the qvevri tradition as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
The wines produced here are amber-colored from months of skin contact, tannic in ways white wine is not supposed to be, structured like reds but made from white grapes. They are unlike anything most American wine drinkers encounter. They are also among the most compelling wines in the world.
A qvevri sealed with clay in a Georgian marani. Inside, wine ferments the way it has for 8,000 years — on skins, in silence, underground.
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What Is A Qvevri Wine?
The short answer: it is a white wine made like a red. In conventional winemaking, white grapes are pressed and the juice ferments separately from the skins. In the Georgian qvevri method, grapes, skins, stems and seeds go into the buried clay vessel together. Fermentation begins spontaneous, often driven by wild yeasts. When fermentation finishes, the vessel is sealed. Skins and stems slowly sink in what Bitarishvili calls “natural filtration.” The clear wine above is drawn off without fining, filtration or significant added sulfur.
“During fermentation, you go to each qvevri every two hours,” says Kakha Tchotiashvili, co-founder and winemaker of Tchotiashvili Family Vineyards. He has 45 qvevri in his cellar. “For a month, you don’t sleep. If you compare this to a tank — you press a button and that is it. This is a completely different story.”
What comes out is what Georgians call amber wine — not orange wine. Patrick Honnef, winemaker at Château Mukhrani, where he has worked with indigenous varieties in the Kartli region for 12 years, puts the American consumer’s first encounter plainly: “Half the people taste this and say, interesting, this is good. Half say, who needs this? Both reactions are valid if you’ve never had this style before.”
It is worth saying clearly: qvevri wine represents only about 5% of Georgia’s commercial production. The majority of Georgian wine reaching export markets is made in what producers call the European style — stainless steel fermentation, conventional winemaking, easily approachable.
These are not natural wines by default; they are professionally made, quality-driven bottles that happen to come from one of the world’s most biodiverse grape cultures. Shota Natroshvili, export manager and brand ambassador for Teliani Valley, is candid about the distinction: “We’ve overdone ‘cradle of wine.’ People hear it the first time and it’s exciting. The second time, they’ve already heard it.” The wine itself, he argues, has to do the work.
A Country Of 525 Grapes
Georgia has more than 500 indigenous grape varieties — the densest concentration of native wine diversity on earth. To put that in perspective: Italy, long celebrated for its viticultural biodiversity, has given the world varieties like Susumaniello from Puglia and Vermentino from Sardinia that were barely known outside their regions a generation ago. Portugal’s Encruzado from the Dão and Baga from Bairrada were largely unfamiliar to American drinkers a decade ago. Both are now sought after. Georgia’s library dwarfs both countries, and most of it remains unknown outside its borders.
Approximately 10 to 12 varieties appear with any regularity on export labels. Saperavi is the starting point for reds — the name means dye in Georgian, a reference to its extraordinary pigmentation, one of only a handful of grapes in the world with naturally colored flesh and juice.
Natroshvili calls it Georgia’s Malbec: accessible flavor profile, firm tannins, enough structure to age, with bold dark fruit that pairs naturally with red meat, pizza and barbecue.
For whites and ambers, Rkatsiteli is the workhorse, producing everything from crisp stainless-steel whites to the most structured qvevri amber wines. “Rkatsiteli in qvevri is a red wine made from a white grape,” Natroshvili says. Decant it, serve it at room temperature, pair it with meat and aged cheese.
Kisi is the discovery grape — aromatic, rounder than Rkatsiteli, with floral and stone fruit notes that develop truffle-like depth in qvevri. “Kisi has become one of the favorites of sommeliers in the last few years,” says Natroshvili. It ranks among the most compelling food wines available under $30.
Among rarer varieties, Tavkveri deserves attention — a pale red from Kartli with spice, blue fruit and low alcohol around 12%, the kind of wine that converts skeptics without announcing itself. Honnef produces it at Château Mukhrani and describes it as the direction Georgian wine is moving: “Light, fresher, can be slightly chilled.”
Tchotiashvili, who farms rare highland varieties alongside Saperavi, argues that Georgia’s best introduction to American consumers runs from the lighter, more European-adjacent wines of the highland regions down to Saperavi last — not because Saperavi is lesser, but because it is most distinct, and most powerful when a drinker already knows the context.
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The Supra Is The Point
None of this — the grapes, the clay, the centuries spent defending both — exists apart from how Georgians actually drink the wine. Outside of a supra, the traditional Georgian feast, wine is rarely served at all. “There is no wine sipping on a patio,” says Natroshvili. “If you understand Georgian cuisine, you understand Georgian wine, because there is always food on the table.”
A supra is not built around courses; everything arrives at once, and the table stays full for hours. A tamada, or toastmaster — typically an elder or someone the group trusts — guides a structured sequence of toasts: first to God, then to family, then to those who have died, before opening into toasts for love, friendship and the people gathered at the table. Wine is taken from small vessels, each toast finished to the bottom. “This is not about getting drunk,” Natroshvili says. “It is about sharing a table with family, or with a stranger, because we believe a stranger is a gift from God.”
“Wine is not an alcoholic beverage for us,” says Kate Botticelli, an archaeologist who guides visitors throughout Georgia and grew up in this culture. “It is sacred. My grandfather made a qvevri when my mother was born. He opened it when she got married. That wine was at the wedding.”
Marina Bitarishvili, Iago’s wife and the first woman in Georgia to make wine professionally, carries that weight in her own way. When she presents her wines at a London fair in 2010 — her first time showing outside Georgia — a woman approaches and asks how she makes her clay-vessel wine with nine months of skin contact. The woman turns out to be an Italian winemaker who has been working alone on the same method. “I thought I was the only one,” Marina says. They have been close friends ever since. Today, Marina leads a Georgian women winemaker association with 15 members.
For her, the work was never only about wine. “It was symbolic,” Iago Bitarishvili says. “To destroy the stereotype.”
The Oldest New Wine In The World
Lado Uzunashvili, winemaker and CEO of Vazisubani Estate in Kakheti, produces both qvevri and European-style wines from the same grapes and the same vintage. Standing in his cellar, looking out at the Caucasus Mountains, he offers a frame that clarifies everything: “We are a small country, but we have survived 17 occupations. What remains unbroken is the wine culture. To understand resilience, people study Georgia.”
He calls tasting the two styles — European and traditional — side by side “8,000 years between the glasses.” In one glass: what most of the world’s wine tastes like today. In the other: what wine tastes like before the world figures out what to do with it.
Watching Iago Bitarishvili describe the qvevri sealing process — wet clay rolled into ropes, pressed over glass, kept moist so it does not crack — it is impossible not to feel the weight of what is in those vessels. The wine is 2024. The vessel may be a century old. The technique is 8,000 years old. None of that is metaphor.
Both styles are worth drinking. Only one of them is irreplaceable.
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