Wine, made in clay
Georgians have been making wine for roughly 8,000 years, fermenting it underground in clay qvevri. The method is inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list, and the country still grows hundreds of grapes found nowhere else.
More than 500 indigenous grape varieties
Eight thousand years
The oldest chemical evidence of winemaking found anywhere comes from pottery in what is now Georgia, dated to around 6,000 BC. That gives the country roughly eight thousand unbroken years of it, and the claim to have invented the practice — which Georgians make often, and with reason.
Wine made in clay
The traditional method uses a qvevri: a large egg-shaped clay vessel buried to its neck in the floor of a cellar. Grapes go in whole, skins and all, and stay there through fermentation, which for white grapes produces the deep amber wine now sold everywhere as orange wine. The qvevri method was added to UNESCO's intangible cultural heritage list in 2013.
Most of the country's wine comes from Kakheti, east of Tbilisi. Saperavi is the dark red everyone knows and Rkatsiteli the workhorse white, but Georgia grows well over 500 indigenous grape varieties, the large majority of which are found nowhere else.
In the cellar and out of it
Wine here is domestic before it is commercial: a marani, the family cellar, is a normal thing for a village house to have, and much of what is drunk never passes through a shop. Chacha, the clear spirit distilled from what the qvevri leaves behind, is the other half of that tradition.
None of it is compulsory. Tbilisi's cafés run on coffee, the lemonades are excellent, and no one at the table counts.
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