It’s time to embrace the new Georgian era

My neighbours enthusiastically take most of my sampled wine off my hands, saving me the indignity of winecorroded kitchen pipes. Only once has anyone returned bottles. A set of Georgian qvevri wines I had hand-delivered to an intellectual and socially minded presence on the street came back with the polite observation that his palate ‘wasn’t up to appreciating them’.

I sympathise entirely. Georgian qvevri (pronounced ‘k-vevri’) wines – red and orange wines matured in huge earthenware vessels of the same name sunk into the ground – have received a gigantic amount of attention over the past decade. Wine cool kids love them. For me, flavour-wise, qvevri wines are quite a mixed bag, ranging from interesting to challenging to unpleasantly faulty. But the Georgian wine story is already changing, and now I like more of what I taste.

‘When we started selling Georgian wine around 15 years ago, there was quite a feeling of isolation. Now wine tourism is huge,’ says Doug Wregg of Les Caves de Pyrene, an importer that has done more than most to put Georgia on the wine map. That travel is happening in both directions. ‘It’s always telling to look at what producers are drinking,’ he continues. ‘When I visit winemakers in Georgia, I look at their empty bottles and see wines from the Loire, Burgundy and Jura. Those are the influences. And the audience is sommeliers and bars in New York, Paris, Sydney, London, Melbourne and Tokyo.’

You can still expect to find wines made of indigenous grape varieties – krakhuna, tsitska, saperavi and so on. But, often, the long maceration with the skins that gives wines – even white ones – astringency, texture and additional colour has been reduced. There are more wines made in a contemporary idiom: prioritising freshness and purity over tannin and extraction. Wregg points me to the wines of Mariam Guniava, a young female winemaker who, like her father, is making wines in qvevri but in a notably fruity, joyful, easy style (see Wines of the Week). Note that we are not talking a Californianwine-brand level of fruity; this is relative to the Georgian wines you might previously have encountered.

Despite the coverage, some Georgian wine producers are now using qvevri less. The reason? If the vessels are not properly cleaned, wine made in them can end up with a bacterial taint that smells ‘mousey’. Some makers happily sell wines like this (I know because

I have tasted them); others throw them away rather than taint their reputation, which, needless to say, is costly.

One producer that has moved some of its wines out of qvevri is Pheasant’s Tears. It has also done a big label redesign. The wines now look less traditional, more stylish cosmopolitan restaurant, and they taste great.

I’ve also enjoyed some wines made by Teliani Valley, a big producer that champions innovation and modern techniques but without losing the personality that makes the wines feel Georgian.

Many of these more contemporary Georgian wines are delicious. You do need to be on more of an Ottolenghi than a Greggs sausage roll wavelength, and the reds do need food. But this story of a country in the South Caucasus, where wine vines are thought to have been domesticated as long as 11,000 years ago, still has a way to roll.

For these wines, you do need to be on more of an Ottolenghi than a Greggs sausage roll wavelength