The Story of Georgian Wine

By Kathleen Willcox

A vineyard in Georgia’s Kakheti region, where 75 percent of the country’s wine is grown. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, by Levan Gokadze (uploaded by Giorgi Balakhadze) - [1], CC BY-SA 2.0.

Georgia is a Russian nesting doll of a country. In the past century alone, it has experienced more than its share of golden glory, fierce combat, intrigue, revolution and despair; and behind every story, there’s yet another life waiting to be discovered. 

It’s impossible to neatly incapsulate any country’s geography, history and culture in a few sentences, but here goes: Georgia is about the size of Connecticut, located in the Caucasus region of Eurasia, south of Russia, west of Azerbaijan, north of Armenia and Turkey, with the Black Sea lapping at its western shores. It holds about 3.7 million people within its bounds and has one of the most diverse and mountainous territories in Europe; in one day, visitors can drive from a temperate rainforest (the Colchic Forest), to a glacier (the Chaladi), to the desert (the Gareja Desert).

Paging through Georgia’s recent history will reveal just as many dramatic surprises. Since November 26, 1799, when Russian troops entered the Georgian city of Tiflis, the country has been bridling under the yoke of Russian, then Soviet rule. Though it declared political independence from the USSR in 1991, as with many Eastern Bloc countries, the cultural and economic legacy of those years can still be felt, and in Georgia’s case, there is still an unwelcome Russian presence in portions of the country. 

The richness of the country’s terroir—10 major wine regions span wet and subtropical, dry and continental, and cold and alpine climates—and the challenges its recent history present are exemplified, in many ways, through the wine industry. It has, just like Georgia’s people, been through at least two major transformations in the past half-century, and is just now returning to its delicious roots, with its eyes to the future. 

BACK IN THE USSR

Under Soviet rule from 1922-1991, Georgia’s vineyards were transformed. 

“Being part of the Soviet bloc changed everything,” says Julie Peterson, managing partner at Marq Wine Group, which leads U.S. strategy for the National Wine Agency in Georgia. “At the turn of the century, they had an incredibly diverse range of indigenous grapes. Under Soviet rule, Ukraine was considered the bread basket of the USSR, and Georgia was the wine casket. Vineyards were uprooted and nationalized, and the grapes that were encouraged to grow were saperavi for reds and rkatsiteli for whites. They were grown for volume, not quality, and it was essentially sweet plonk. The biggest wineries had train tracks built so that trains could roll in and grapes or bulk wine could be just loaded into the train.” 

The 500-plus indigenous grapes, many of which are only grown in Georgia, would have been lost completely if it weren’t for the small family vineyards and plots that were permitted to thrive in the countryside, along with the massive state-run vineyards, says Tariel Chichua, a Cornell-trained Georgian native, and cofounder of Telavi, Georgia’s Lost Eden winery.

While large-scale vineyards and wineries were not allowed to “operate independent of the state,” he says that they looked the other way when it came to allowing Georgians to grow and make wine for their own consumption, realizing that to do otherwise would risk revolution. 

“Households could produce wine for their own consumption and were sometimes allowed to sell it in small quantities,” says Chichua. “It would have been dangerous to eliminate this aspect of our lives, as that would be viewed as sacrilegious by Georgians.” 

It wasn’t just the enchantingly named array of grapes—aladasturi, ojaleshi, krakhuna, goruli mtsvane, tetri, kisi—and the quality of the wine that Soviet culture endangered. It was the method of winemaking itself. 

In 2017, archeologists discovered fragments of 8,000-year-old qvevri, or clay pots, which were used by Stone Age farmers to ferment and store wine, 20 miles south of Tbilisi. The beeswax lined pots have been used in the country ever since, though the practice was crippled under Soviet rule.  

“Georgia’s winemaking process was completely industrialized,” says Keto Ninidze, owner of Oda Family Winery in Samegrelo, in the western region of Georgia. Ninidize founded Oda in 2015, in honor of her husband’s great-grandparents, whose ancestral home their winery is based out of. “The approach was based on a five-year plan instituted by the Soviets, which gathered strength under Stalin after World War II. To make any money, growers had to sell low-quality wine produced on large scales. It was so poor, the winemakers wouldn’t drink it, they just exported it to Soviet countries.” Stalin, incidentally, hailed from Gori, Georgia, himself.

The traditional practice of making wine in qvevri was “absolutely marginalized,” Ninidze explains. 

“It’s nearly impossible to produce wine fermented and stored in qvevri on a commercial level,” explains Peterson. “It’s hard to keep the surfaces clean. Winemakers who use them climb inside every day of harvest and scrub them for two weeks. It requires meticulous care and attention, something the Soviet-style of bulk winemaking couldn’t accomplish.” 

Instead, wine during the Soviet era was primarily fermented and stored in cement tanks or steel. But the egg-shaped earthenware qvevri is essential for those who want to create true Georgian wine, Chichua argues. Wines made in qvevri can be more complex, with additional layers of minerality and a robust structure than wine made in cement or steel. Whites made in qvevri often develop tannic structure and sometimes an amber hue. 

“The wine has been made in qvevri for millennia, and it connects us to heritage, tradition, the divine,” he says. “It also produces excellent wine, and gives you a foundation for infinite experimentation with blended or single-grape wines. These wines put you in touch with mother nature, leaves the winemaker at her mercy then finally rewards us with wine in its purest form. Alive, breathing and far removed from human intervention.” 

Industrializing the growing and making of wine was bad enough, but Soviet rule also significantly reduced the amount of land devoted to grape-growing in Georgia. Then in 1985, much of Georgia’s vineyards were ripped out when Mikhail Gorbachev launched a campaign to combat alcohol abuse. The total vineyard space was reduced to a quarter of its original size, from 395,000 acres to about 111,000 acres.

Wines made in qvevri can be more complex, with additional layers of minerality and a robust structure than wine made in cement or steel. Whites made in qvevri often develop tannic structure and sometimes an amber hue. Photo courtesy Lost Eden.

POST-SOVIET ERA 

When Georgia declared its independence in April of 1991, wine culture didn’t magically return to its Golden Age. On the contrary, much remained the same, with bulk wine produced in big vineyards for export, primarily to Russia, and home winemaking utilizing a diverse array of grapes and traditional techniques. 

It took another act of aggression on Russia’s part in fact, to inspire the wine Renaissance taking place in Georgia today. 

“When Vladimir Putin put an embargo in place against Georgian wine in 2006, 90 percent of it was going to Russia,” says Peterson. “It was the sweet plonk of course. But when winemakers turned to other markets, they discovered that Western consumers had a much drier palate, and one more suited to classic Georgian wine.” 

Winemakers also quickly discovered how valuable that market was, particularly in the U.S. 

“Wine is the number one export in Georgia, and the average income in the country is $4,000 a year, whereas ours is $57,000,” Peterson points out. “These realizations changed things for Georgia. It reversed the brain drain, and suddenly lawyers and engineers, some trained in the West, were returning to their family plots to make wine that they could sell at $7 a bottle.” 

Chichua, who founded Lost Eden with Levan Gachechiladze and Lado Uzunashvili, is an example of this financier-turned-winemaker model. Uzenashvili’s family has been making wine for 11 generations, and Gachechiladze had spent his career in wine, much of it outside Georgia though. Chichua studied business at Cornell and returned to this project in a bid to honor his country’s past, while making an economically sustainable living. Instead of making industrial-style wine, Lost Eden makes old-style Georgian wine for the New World.

“Grape [varieties] that have been forgotten are being planted again for the first time in generations, and hundreds of small wineries are making exquisite wines using traditions that were tucked away during Soviet times, but safeguarded and passed down,” Chichua explains. Lost Eden is opting to market itself to the U.S. alone, betting on American curiosity about the oldest but “last undiscovered wine country.” 

The blockade ended in 2013, but there was no going back. In 2007, Georgia exported their first classic qvevri-fermented wines to the U.S., and ever since the wine cognoscenti got a taste, it has been hooked.
“My friend and colleague Lisa Granic, who is a Master of Wine, introduced me to Georgian wine,” says Bruno Almeida, who most recently worked as wine director at Tocqueville in New York City. “That was in 2012, and I visited Georgia twice to understand the culture and the process, and I was just completely enthralled by the diversity and beauty of the country. We began bringing Georgian wine in and wine lovers really responded. It is very of the moment in that it’s based on ancient techniques, focuses on unique varietals and natural winemaking, and it offers profoundly new characteristics thanks to the qvevri and skin contact. For a lot of people, drinking white wine with structure and tannins didn’t happen until they tried Georgian wine.

As of 2019, there were 1,088 Georgian wine companies registered to sell wine commercially, with 350 registered to export, the Georgian Department of Agriculture reports. (That’s up from 402 registered wineries in 2016). About 150 Georgian wineries sell their juice in the U.S.  Between 2018 and 2019 alone, imports of Georgian wine to the U.S. were up 46%, and as of October of this year, imports are tracking an increase of 33% year-over-year. 

Winemakers bury qvevri to keep them cool and stabilize them. Photo via Wikimedia Commons, by Levan Gokadze from Tbilisi, Georgia - Flickr.com, CC BY-SA 2.0.

LOOKING AHEAD  

Georgian winemakers get more cash per bottle on average from U.S. consumers; about $5.11 a bottle, more than double the average export price to China and other former Soviet countries, according to the Georgian Department of Agriculture. This motivates winemakers to double down on their efforts to create classic Georgian style wine, which may take more time and money initially but more than make up for it in the end, Peterson says.

But it’s about more than cash of course. It’s about resilience and a pure delight in classic Georgian wine. 

“It’s only 30 years since Georgia became an independent republic, and this is not enough to build up this whole corpus of vine-growing and winemaking,” says Ninidze. “But we are returning to our roots, using qvevri, planting the rare grapes, making new blends and searching for new terroirs with nature-friendly practices that take our environment and culture into mind. It is, I believe, the best way to mark Georgia on the world map.” 

Unfortunately, but perhaps not surprisingly, a Hollywood ending isn’t in sight. While Putin nixed the embargo on Georgian wine in 2013, he invaded the country in 2008, occupying two sovereign regions in the Black Sea coastal region of Abhazia and the central Georgian region of South Ossetia, aka Tskhinvali. According to the Embassy of Georgia to the United States of America, the “borderization” entails a technique in which Russian forces moved the fences that mark the limits of the invasion ever-farther into Georgia. In recent months, the effort has been stepped up, and Peterson reports that only nine of the 10 winemaking regions in Georgia can currently produce wine.   

In a time of deep partisan divide, economic uncertainty, with a deadly disease threatening not just our lives, but our way of life, where seemingly anything can and will happen at any moment, Georgia’s winemakers appear resolved to maintain their traditions, ideals and paradigm—in direct defiance of what logic or common sense arguably dictates. 

Some winemakers, like Ramaz Nikoladze of Nikoladze Wine Cellar, based in Imereti, Georgia, who is making wine in the traditional method from vineyards planted by his grandparents, and who believes the “Soviet system ruined winemaking for generations by taking away lands and vineyards, decreasing the diversity of grape varieties and stopping the use of qvevri,” wouldn’t even consider selling to Russia today.

“The occupation worries every Georgian citizen,” Nikoladze says. “We have already lost endemic varieties and wines in the occupied regions. I have never sold my wine in Russian, and I never will. Still, my brand is growing, slowly, but surely.”

Seen from afar, their practical approach to living in the moment, with resistance and grace, feels especially aspirational as we move into a New Year.  

“About 20 percent of their land is occupied, and that occupation keeps inching up,” says Peterson. “Yet, they continue making wine, investing in the future, building out their businesses and living their lives, and celebrating with more joy than I thought possible. Even though they don’t know what will come. It’s incredible, it’s beautiful and it inspires me, every day to keep going, and keep doing what I love as well as I can. No matter what.” 

An Extremely Abbreviated Timeline of Key Events in Georgia 

6000 BCE: The date of the earliest signs in winemaking in Georgia 

1200 BCE: Proto-Georgian tribes begin to organize 

653 BCE 

400 BCE: Early city-states, such as Iberia and Colchis, are established 

1100-1200: David IV and Tamar I rule over what is now known as Georgia’s Golden Age 

1200-1800: Disintegration, partition 

1799-1801: Russia invades integrates Georgia into its Empire 

1921: Vineyards are nationalized 

1922: The USSR brings Georgia under its control 

1920s: Phylloxera strikes 

1991: Georgia declares independence, state property, including large vineyards, are privatized 

1992: Civil War 

2006-2013: Russia puts Georgian wine under embargo, an eight-year period during which Georgia’s wine exports dropped 90 percent. This is also a period of great creativity and growth in the artisanal wine market. In 2007, wineries begin exporting wine to the U.S. 

2008: Border War in South Ossetia with Russia 

An Extremely Abbreviated Overview of Georgia’s Wine Regions 

WESTERN GEORGIA: Key wine regions: Imereti, Guria, Samegrelo, Racha, Lechkhumi, Adjari. Imereti contains 15 percent of the country’s planted vineyards. The climate is subtropical, with clay-dominant soil on mountains up to 800 meters above sea level. The wines here tend to be light and fresh. 

CENTRAL GEORGIA: Key wine regions: Kvemo Kartli, Mtskheta-Mtianeti, Shida Kartli. Kartlie contains 7.4% of Georgia’s planted vineyards. The climate is continental and dry, with volcanic soil, some limestone and ranges in elevation of 300-800 meters above sea level. These wines bear the most classic European influence. 

EASTERN GEORGIA: Key wine regions: Inner Kakheti, Outer Kakheti. Almost 75% of Georgia’s vines are planted here. The climate is continental, with alluvial clay and loamy soils, some limestone, shale and slate. The wines here the most classically Georgian—incredibly powerful and suited for pairing with Georgia’s rich, rustic, meaty cuisine.