Georgia has been making wine for eight thousand years. Britain has been drinking it for about ten.
Wine did not begin in France, or Italy, or Greece. It began in the South Caucasus, in the country Georgians call Sakartvelo, where archaeologists have found grape residue in clay vessels dating back to 6000 BC. That makes Georgia the oldest continuous winemaking culture on earth: not by a century or two, but by several thousand years.
The method that started it all is still in use. A qvevri is a large egg-shaped clay vessel, buried to its neck in the floor of the cellar, where the earth holds it at a steady temperature through fermentation and beyond. Grapes go in whole: skins, stems and all, and stay there for months. UNESCO added the qvevri method to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2013.
What comes out is unlike anything else. White grapes fermented on their skins turn deep amber, with tannin and grip you would normally only find in red wine. Saperavi, one of the very few grapes on earth with red flesh as well as red skin, comes out almost opaque.
Why we do this
Georgian wine is not a novelty, and it is not a curiosity. It is a complete winemaking tradition with 500-odd indigenous grape varieties, most of which have never been planted anywhere else. Rkatsiteli. Mtsvane. Khikhvi. Kisi. Chinuri. Usakhelauri, of which there are only a handful of hectares in the world.
We import direct from the producers: Binekhi, Buera, Château Mukhrani, Periani and Sarajishvili, and ship across the UK from bonded storage. No middlemen, no supermarket blending, no guessing about provenance.
Where to start
If you have never had Georgian wine before, three suggestions. A qvevri amber if you want to taste what makes this country different. A Saperavi if you like structured reds and want to meet a great grape you have somehow never met. Or a Kindzmarauli if you have been told semi-sweet red is unserious and would like to be proved wrong.