Is Georgia’s Ancient Wine Making Method Making A Comeback?
Mary Beth Durkin
Gia Gamtkitsulashvili’s muscular frame is sprawled across a stone floor next to a large round hole covered with dirt. While pushing back that gray mass of soil, he lifts a glass lid that reveals the terra cotta lips of a giant clay pot. That pot holds 50 liters (40 bottles) of buried Georgian Rkatsiteli grapes that have turned into wine and are ready for tasting!
At Twins Winery, in Napareuli, Georgia, Gamtkitsulashvili and his twin brother Gella make wine using a centuries old method unique to the country of Georgia. It dates back some 8,000 years and was used by their grandfather. Grapes are crushed in a hollowed out log that flows directly into these egg shaped clay pots called kvevri, (pronounced ku-vev-ree) also spelled qvevri.
Stems, skins and seeds are left on the grapes and the womb-like structure allows the solids to settle naturally at the bottom. Alice Feiring, who writes about Georgian wines says, “The great thing that the buried clay offers is one of the most important things to keep wine from turning to vinegar, which is a natural consistent temperature control.”
What makes this ancient method different from conventional methods? Feiring says two things, “the vessel and extended skin contact.” The unique qualities this method imparts to Georgian wine are especially accentuated in their whites. Conventional white wine makers strip grapes of their skins, stems and seeds, but kvevri wine makers of both red and white throw it all in. While conventional wine makers do leave skins on their reds, they are also allowed to use as many as seventy-two different additives to tweak flavor and aid fermentation. Things like yeast, uric acid, sulfites, tartaric acid, and bacteria are just a few.
Brent Trela, an enologist (aka wine scientist) who worked for the World Bank in Georgia to help restore wine production, says kvevri wines don’t need additives. The skins, stems, and seeds have bacteria and yeast that naturally aid fermentation. Trela says, the skins are full of tannins, a naturally occurring compound containing phenolics that have heart healthy flavonoids. Tannins make your lips pucker and give the Georgian whites a less fruity more savory, drier taste. With longer skin contact the whites develop an amber hue and depending on how long they’ve fermented some of the Georgian whites skew towards orange.
Natural wine enthusiast, Alice Feiring, equates modern wine making with a “helicopter parent who is always interjecting themselves into every moment of their child’s life.” She says, the Georgian kvevri method is “one of absolute minimal handling, Georgian wine has minimal sulphur. The ego is removed in the Georgian method and modern wine making is all about control.” Feiring says modern wine makers, “approach a wine with how do I want this wine to taste,” adjusting it with additives to achieve different tastes. According to Feiring, the kvevri wine maker is “just showing you the best example of agriculture and place [and] what that vintage wanted to do.”
Wine and Georgia? It’s not an association you immediately make, but this tiny country, the size of West Virginia, lays claim to an arsenal of about 530 varieties of indigenous grapes, some centuries old. It’s a vinicultural oasis wedged between Russia, Turkey, Armenia and Azerbaijan with a varied landscape that includes the snow covered Caucasus Mountains, subtropical tea plantations, rolling vineyards and the beaches of the Black Sea. It’s a geographical gem that Vogue has dubbed the “hottest” destination in Europe for 2017.
Further cementing Georgia’s claim to being the “birth place of wine”, last June, an archaeological dig in it’s southeastern region unearthed domesticated seeds and vine residue dating back 8,000 years.
After 70 years of Soviet occupation and a war with Russia in 2008, Georgia is recapturing its’ wine making past. The Gamtkitsulashvilis are part of a resurgence of Georgian winemakers getting back to their roots. Irakli Cholobargia, who heads the marketing department at Georgia’s National Wine Agency, says this ancient method is putting Georgia on the world’s wine making map. Cholobargia explains, “kvevri wines are the key drivers of promoting the idea of Georgian wine overall.” According to Georgia’s National Wine Agency, the number of kvevri wine makers in Georgia has tripled in the last five years. Its popularity has also spurred on Georgia’s bigger conventional wine makers to add kvevris to their wine making operations.
Cholobargia points out that while kvevri wines are not “volume” drivers, their unique flavor and processing method gives the Georgian’s a marketing edge, one that’s landed a few kvevri wines on the menus of Michelin starred restaurants in Copenhagen and France.
As the Georgian wine business rebuilds itself, exports to the United States increased thirty percent from 2014 to 2015 and forty percent to other countries such as Japan, China, Russia, and parts Western Europe. At Twins Winery, Gia Gamtkitsulashvili says in 2005 they produced 5,000 bottles of kvevri wine and today that has exploded to 350,000 bottles!
According to Gamtkitsulashvili, kvevri wine making was frowned upon after the Soviets invaded Georgia in 1921. Pointing to a set of black and white photos of his grandfather, Gamtkitsulashvili explains that his grandfather was exiled by the Soviets when he refused to give his winery to Stalin’s agricultural collective.
Under the Soviets, private land was transferred to the state and farmed as a collective to increase agricultural supplies. In Georgia, the Soviets industrialized wine making and shipped in big steel vats for production, doing away with the boutique kvevri method. The Gamtkitsulashvili brothers never saw their grandfather again, but got their land back in the early 90s after the Soviet Union dissolved.
In her book, For the Love of Wine: My Odyssey, Through the World’s most Ancient Wine Culture, author Alice Feiring writes about the Soviet takeover of Georgian wine production, she says, “The wine really, really got bad under the Soviets because the need for productivity was so high and it was impossible to make in kvevris. The kvevris are very hard to clean, you can’t pump them out that quickly.” For the Soviets, it was all about quantity as opposed to quality.
In Georgia, wine is infused in every aspect of culture, folklore, and religion. Elene Rakviashvili, who works for Georgia’s National Tourism Administration says, “The grape is sacred for Georgians and wine is a pure liquid, that’s why even the tree of life is represented by branches of grapes.” Religious crosses with grape vines and plump bunches of grapes are carved into the stone of many of the Georgian Orthodox Churches. One of the most venerated saints, Saint Nino, and her grapevine cross is a symbol of Georgian Christianity.
Traveling through Georgia you see giant clay pots unearthed and laying on their sides paying homage to Georgia’s wine past.
Kvevris have recently made their way to the United States. I visited retired wine lovers, Terry and Kathy Sullivan, who have been making their own kvevri wine in Columbia, Maryland for two years now. The Sullivans brought a small, 23 liter, kvevri back after their second visit to Georgia. They first went for the International Wine Tourism conference in 2014, which was held in Tbilisi. Terry Sullivan says, “We fell in love with the Georgian kvevri wines and stayed at Twins Winery in Georgia to learn how to make them.” The Sullivans trekked through the wineries of Georgia and wrote a book about it. Besides the book, they write a blog about their wine journeys around the globe. They shared a glass of their home brew with me. It has a crisp and dry taste with a plush smoothness that is silky and refreshing all at the same time.
In Texas, potter Billy Ray Mangham is making kvevris at Sleeping Dog Pottery. He studied with a master kvevri maker in Georgia and now he’s part of, The Qvevri Project. Their mission, according to their website, is “ensuring the production of high quality, custom qvevri and making available Georgia grape varieties for the North American market as well as supporting and promoting research on qvevri wine production.”
Kvevri wines from Georgia can be found in a few stores and restaurants in New York City, San Francisco and Washington DC. Noel Brockett, who distributes both conventional and kvevri wine from Georgia in Washington DC for the Georgia Wine House, says it may take time to reach the general public but, “the Sommelier community is definitely becoming much more interested in the kvevri wines as the general market turns toward authenticity.”
That’s a trend that the Gamtkitsuvashili brothers hope will continue. According to Gia Gamtkitsulashvili, his town has struggled with poverty ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union. His hope is that he sees the birth of 40 to 50 cellars in his village and that Georgian wine becomes popular around the globe.
—
Mary Beth Durkin is an award winning journalist who writes, blogs and produces videos about food and its’ intersection with our health, public policy and the environment. She is the creator and producer of a food series that is broadcast nationally on the PBS NewsHour. The series received the 2016 James Beard Broadcast Journalism Award for “best television segment” .
