Qvevri Tbilisi Photos
Giorgina Makara
With the current travel restrictions, reading about travel would only make you even more itchy to travel. It certainly did while I was sorting out the photos from my trips to Burgundy and Tbilisi last spring. Tbilisi is one of my go-to destinations for food and I look for every opportunity to go and appease my cravings.
The wine I chose was Saperavi Rcheuli Qvevri 2015 by Tchotiashvili and it was very good with the flavours of dark fruit, spices and the typical earthiness of qvevri wine. The tannins were soft yet firm, lingering on the finish. The fact that my wine novice friends liked the wine proves that it IS a good wine. The winemaker is part of Raw Wine and inspects every bottle and numbers it with his signature.
So I went over to the counter, tasted different wines and picked two bottles they might like. Amiran Otskhanuri Sapere was good, though not as good as the one at Chveni. This place is for natural wine lovers, and I must admit that the wine experience was disappointing, a bit touristic, made worse by unfriendly staff.
When we got there, however, we were told that the wait would be very long. With our stomach set on khinkali, we decided to wait for a table in the drizzling rain. Luckily hubby, with his persuasive charisma, got us in quickly.
I planned to visit a couple of wineries but our trip coincided with New Wine Festival, which means that all wineries will be closed to be present at the festival. A bit disappointed at first but then I thought it might be even better to see and taste all the wines at once. Especially after learning that Naotari and Jakeli wines will be there, I became excited since I came across the wines at Raw Wine London and wanted to know more about them.
It was all worth the effort and we had so much fun. If you like natural wine, orange wine, amber wine and such or simply like to try a wide range of Georgian wine, I suggest planning your trip around the festival, which takes place in May.
It was great to taste so many wines and encounter other local grape varieties besides the well-known Saperavi, Kisi and Rkatsiteli. Towards the end of the wine-tasting spree, we grabbed one of our favourite wines and sat down with some bbq pork and cheese bread. How delightful!
The other big issue on my mind was, of course, wine. Georgians say that winemaking originated there, with evidence of wine production going back 8,000 years. Yes! Let me say that again. 8,000 years. This is confirmed by UNESCO which has placed the Qvevri wine making method on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. This ancient Georgian traditional method of making wine involves pressing the grapes and then pouring everything into large egg-shaped earthenware qvevri that are either buried in the ground or set into the floor. The wine is left to ferment and the skins and stalks etc are pressed down regularly and go to the bottom with the wine ultimately drawn off the top. What is left at the bottom is distilled into a type of Georgian brandy called chacha.
Today in Georgia, there is also a lot of wine made by the classic European method and there are hundreds of different grape varieties, although not all in commercial production. It is said that in Georgia everyone makes wine and while that may now be changing, it seems that most families have at least one winemaker in the extended family group. Out of all the Georgian wines we tried, my favourites were Saperavi (a very popular dry red), Kisi (a golden white) and Tvishi (a fruity semi-sweet white which works well as a dessert wine). A wine tour, especially to the Kakheti region close to Tbilisi, is highly recommended.
A lot has happened since John Baker gave up on the whole dusty mess, and when we visited Tbilisi recently we were on the trail. Our sleuthing unearthed this blog post written in January 2023 by an English academic and wine writer, Tim Unwin, who had visited the cellars in 1997. We ascertained from his description and photos that at the time of his visit it was known as the Savane winery.
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