Introduction
When I told people that I was traveling to Georgia for wine, invariably the response was, “Great!” Then came the look of confusion as they did a double take and asked, “Umm, how far from Atlanta are the vines?”
“The country of, ” I’d say, then further clarify that this Georgia was not in the United States. “It’s the one under the Caucasus mountain range, not the Blue Ridge.”
“Really? They make wines there?”
They sure do, and I adore them.
Georgia is a small and rich country, about the size of West Virginia. On the west is the Black Sea. To the north lies Russia. On the southeast is Azerbaijan and to the south are Armenia and Turkey. Save for Russia (even though it does refer to its vodka as wine) all of those countries have an ancient winemaking heritage; wine origins seem to be in that zone. And they are all clamoring to be called the region of origin of wine. But Georgia might have an advantage. Now sitting in the National Museum in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi is the oldest cultivated grape seed, which carbon dating puts between six and eight thousand years old. But whoever ultimately wins that “We’re the oldest” race, Georgia, with its 525 or so indigenous grapes, has the longest unbroken winemaking history. They say it has eight thousand vintages.
What tenacity, despite being battered through centuries by the Ottomans and the Persian Shah Abbas II, who viciously tore up the grapevines, thinking it was from there that the Georgians derived their strength. They’d been abused under the Russians and then had further suffered the insults of communism. Through it all they never lost their wine tradition. They clung to their ghvino (wine) with such a passion you’d think it was their blood. They also clung to a clay pot called a qvevri, in which they made their wine with unfailing devotion.
Reading through Henry W. Nevinson’s view of Georgia in his 1920 Peoples of All Nations: Their Life Today and Story of Their Past, I was struck by how little had changed. Nevinson writes the following about Georgia: “The chief product was wine. The country seems to run with wine. The grapes are squeezed in primitive presses, cleaned with boughs of yew, and the juice run off into huge earthenware vats sunk in the ground, and big enough to hold a man, for when fermentation is finished and the wine drawn off a man gets into the vat to clean it out. The wine is usually poured into tanned buffalo skins, which are laid upon narrow wooden cars and driven slowly along the mountain roads, joggling as they go.”
Except for the tanned skins for transport, the process is pretty much exactly as I witnessed in my own travels. What’s more, now, as then, the country seems to run with and on wine. According to historian David Turashvili in his book His Majesty Georgian Wine, customarily Georgians would first ask about their neighbors’ vines and only then ask about their families. Wine is the Georgians’ poetry and their folklore, their religion and their daily bread.
What do these ancient yet new wines taste like?
There is red and white wine, of course, but the region is most famous for its white wine, which is actually the amber color of rattlesnake venom. Some call it orange. The color comes from making a white wine as a red wine, with skin contact (see chapter 1). This skin contact not only darkens the color but also lends a sturdy texture. Many of the Georgian wines are tannic, like the tannin in a cup of green tea. On the palate there can be sensual explosions of blossom water and honey without the sweetness; there can be exotic, church-evocative spices of myrrh and frankincense and often a nut of juiciness in the middle.
The reds are far from stereotypical, ranging from large and powerful to delicate and light. Flavors can call to mind the desert or the mountains. But with so many different varieties of grapes and variations of soils, there’s a spectrum of tastes.
In a traditional winery one won’t find the familiar wooden barrels. Instead the historical and favored vessels for fermentation and storage are the qvevri, the huge earthenware vats sunk in the ground that Nevinson wrote about. They are particular citron-shaped amphoras, made of the local terra-cotta, sealed, sanitized on the inside with propolis, and strengthened with a lime paint or concrete on the outside. They are buried in the ground, where they can survive safely as long as there are no earthquakes, for generations. And now the qvevri have a stamp of approval from the United Nations.
In 2013 the United Nations acknowledged their importance by awarding the qvevri a place on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list. Ultimately the award is no more than a bit of applause for the home country and a vote that says, “Hey, world, the qvevri needs to survive.” So along with the Argentine tango and traditional violin making in Cremona, as well as the polyphonic songs of Georgia, this, the original container for making wine, is deemed not to be just a museum piece but also a living tradition. Clay — not just in qvevri, but particularly in qvevri — is having its star moment.
The winemaking world is currently crazy for making wine in clay pots, qvevri or otherwise. There is someone making them in Texas. An Italian company named Clayver is producing and marketing a variant on the clay qvevri that it claims is an improvement on a vessel that has been performing beautifully for eight thousand vintages. There are conferences on clay vessels in Tuscany. Winemakers from Australia to South Africa, in France and Italy, are making wine in them. There are tastings in London devoted to them. Other nations have a history of making wine in clay; after all, before there was glass, clay was the container, but whether the pot is a dolia, giara, or tinaja, the Georgian qvevri, with its great-great-grandmother status, is at the top of the heap.
Another reason Georgia has become an unlikely darling is that little has changed in its winemaking technique over the centuries. With little bowing to fashion, it fits right into today’s clamoring for the wines that are called “natural.” Organic viticulture: nothing added and nothing taken away.
And so the remote country and its forty or so (and increasing steadily) commercial natural winemakers find themselves the new international heroes in today’s wine scene.
However, the new winemakers are at a crossroads. They will be under pressure from chemical and technical companies who want their business and who want to sell them new tools and potions. Some will accuse the wines of having rustic tannins. They will say the taste of Georgia is old-fashioned. They will push them to grow French varietals and install irrigation.
Will the new winemakers have what it takes to battle those marketers who would like them to make more modern wines? Will they be able to resist the technical and chemical companies telling them that they need to make more market-dependable wines? Those are the questions I was asking and the answers I was seeking. Whether I was there at a conference, to consult, to write a project for the government, to attend a book party (mine), or to visit, I wanted to understand if they could succeed in something unparalleled, to resist the pressure to commercialize and homogenize. I hoped they were up to the fight, but I didn’t know for sure, though there were clues, embedded deeply within their language and culture.
Perhaps it’s a result of Georgia’s history of constant invasions that the Georgians have developed a kind of posttraumatic stress disorder that motivates them to defend their vine in a deeper way. This readiness to protect themselves from danger is evidenced in the normal fabric of their society. Take, for example, their common toast, “Gaumarjos” — which means “To your victory” — or the variation on hello, “Gamarjoba,” which has a similar meaning.
The reference to war and victory is the result of historically vicious attacks from groups that have included Assyrians, Arabs, Persians, and Mongols from the east and Greeks, Romans, and (notably) Turks from the west. Before that, the country had survived the religious invaders. The bloodshed was particularly vicious in the east of the country, in the region of Kakheti. After all these attacks the beleaguered country was finally absorbed into the Russian empire, only to endure decades of Soviet industrialization. In an illustration of “destroy what you love,” during the seventy years of Soviet domination, the Russians, with their goal of increased production at the cost of quality, not only reduced the country’s varieties to only two or four grapes but also brought the wine that they revered — the Georgian — down to the lowest common denominator. Through it all the Georgians persevered. They fought for their vine the way some fight for their religion.
The Georgians’ wine is their symbol of their survival. And as soon as I sipped my first Georgian wine, their wines and ways became a symbol for my own survival as well. You see, I write about natural wine. Championing the underdog, helping to make room for the authentic that is being lost in an age of industrialization — this is what I’m known for.
Making wine with the philosophy of nothing added or taken away has been growing exponentially in the past decade. Right now much of the rest of the world is returning to the specific winemaking philosophy Georgia has always held dear. It’s nothing short of a revolution. The Georgians have been passionate, religious, and stubborn about it. They had little idea, though, that they had like-minded sisters and brothers in other countries or that they had something to teach the rest of the world about commitment to organic viticulture and minimalist winemaking.
My first visit to the country was in 2011 for the First International Qvevri Symposium. I was struck by the richness of the culture, the music, the food, and the Georgian passion for them all. But I was also impressed by the deliciousness and honesty of the wine. I had never been exposed to a country where wine was so profoundly woven into customs and daily life. The Georgians also showed me they were serious about continuing to work naturally when a group cobbled together the funds to translate my second book, Naked Wine: Letting Grapes Do What Comes Naturally, into their language. The government, instead of fighting natural (the way they do in France or Italy), put money behind the wine’s promotion. While there’s room for both kinds of wines in the world, Georgian government agencies understood that Georgia’s continued recognition would not be for the more inexpensive wines from big companies but for the boutique operations, the organic wines made with little intervention, the wines stripped back to show the natural beauty of the people and the place.
Georgia was motivated, and I had a new wine cause. It became important to me to give these traditional and natural wines enough love and attention so that they’d have a secure place on the wine shelves, in the hope that Georgian winemakers wouldn’t have to resort to making common wines from common grapes in an international style. They needed to celebrate their individuality. That’s where their hearts were. That’s what the world needed. I didn’t want them to make the same mistakes that other countries that had emerged from Soviet regimes had made: entering the wine market, they had ripped out their indigenous grapes and replaced them with ubiquitous ones, giving up their traditional fermenting vessels for newfangled fads, whether stainless or toasty new oak. Those wines lost their accents. They tried to become like the Chilean or the Californian, and they failed in their mission to gain global recognition. In the end those wines were not true to themselves, their country, or their lineage.
On that first trip to Georgia, I saw that the country was eager for all sorts of opinions and consultants. Winemakers wanted to know how their ghvino measured up. During that trip I bumped into a man I knew from California. He was a winemaker. He was a thoughtful man, but he also sold additives and machines, one of which separated wine into sludge, water, and alcohol so that the winemaker could reconstitute it. I was upset to see him in Georgia and worried that his presence there signaled the possibility of his, as well as others’, meddling with the Georgians’ ancestral wine practices. So I summoned my courage to tell him to keep his tricks away from Georgian wine or I would turn into a strong warrior unafraid to protect what she loved.
