What I’m Drinking: 2012 Orgo Rkatsiteli

Tonight’s wine hails from an ephemerally named collective in Telavi, Georgia — their own website uses several different names for the winery interchangeably. But the label says “Orgo” and so will I.

And why should Orgo concern themselves with branding coherence? You don’t drink the wines of fourth-generation winemaker Temuri Dakishvilli because you’re looking for something slick and modern. The wine, 100% Rkatsiteli — or r-kats if you’re feeling pressed for syllables — doesn’t require your packaging either. One does best to remember that the cleanest branding belongs to the ice-cold Pinot grigio you might order at the local fast-casual mediterranean place to go with your mass-produced pasta. Drink up, and make sure you don’t taste anything.

Orgo’s 2012 Rkatsiteli looks like a glass of spar varnish and tastes like an obscenely dry red wine got loose in a barnyard where they’d been raising a flock of black tea bags before rudely bottling itself. It is positively brackish with tannins, brown and wild like the Okefenokee swamp of my childhood.

You might have heard of “orange wines,” those bastards of white wine making. If not, imagine a white wine made like a red wine. The fresh-pressed juice is allowed to sit atop the skins, seeds, and stems like it was being made by neanderthals or bearded hipsters that value the snap of a good Jerusalem artichoke pickle and a bicycle without a complicated gearing system.

This wine isn’t one of the cool orange wines. Northern Italy and central California make those wines, delicate in their balance and restrained in their funk. Those wines are The Bad Plus; playing your favorite tunes with a touch of arhythmic jazz but crucially, CRUCIALLY, still a pop song with enough hook that you can sell it to your less-hip significant other.

Rkatsiteli represents an ancient order. Georgians have been making this style of wine for thousands of years. And what other than ancient could you call a process where a wine is left to sit for months in its own waste products, stored underground in a beeswax-lined clay egg called a Quevri? The wine itself is reductive and oxidative, which are technically wine faults. None other than Robert Parker calls these wines “weird, undrinkable and deeply flawed.”

But tonight’s wine isn’t in my glass because it earned 90+ points from a wine reviewer. It’s in my glass because I needed a viscous boar of a white wine to stand up to this smoked sausage and these roasted root vegetables. The last sip is much different from the first, growing more expressive as it comes to room temperature. I understand why Dakishvili might have come home and continued his father Georgi’s work. His vines survived Communist pogroms in the ’50s and ’60s, they survived the flaccid winemaking of the ’70s and ’80s, and they survived the oak-and-fruit-bombing of the ’90s and 2000s. Those vines, those grapes, and that style that will long outlive you and me and everyone we’ve ever met.

That’s what I’m drinking tonight.

2012 Orgo Rkatsiteli; 100% Rkatsiteli grapes; Telavi, Kakheti, Georgia; $25.99, Batch 13 Spirits, NW Washington DC.