Qvevri, and why the white wine here comes out orange

At some point in Kakheti somebody will take you into a room with a concrete floor, tap it with their foot, and tell you there is wine under there. They are not being poetic. There is wine under there, in a clay vessel the size of a small car, and it has been there since October.

That vessel is a qvevri (ქვევრი), and it is the reason Georgian wine does not taste like anybody else’s.

What a qvevri actually is

It is a clay amphora, egg-shaped, with no handles and no flat bottom, lined inside with beeswax and buried in the ground up to its neck. The working size is around 800 litres, though they run from about 20 litres to ten thousand. Making them is its own trade — a handful of families in Georgia still throw them by hand, coil by coil, and a large one takes months to build and fire.

The burying is not storage, it is temperature control. Two metres down, the ground sits at roughly the same temperature all year, so fermentation happens slowly and steadily without a thermostat, a cooling jacket, or electricity. A family cellar in this valley has none of those things and has never needed them.

The room the qvevri are buried in is the marani. It is usually the coolest and most important room in a Georgian house, and one of our four rooms is named after it.

Why the white wine is orange

Here is the part that surprises people.

In most of the world, white wine is made by pressing the grapes and throwing the skins away. In Kakheti it is made the way red wine is made everywhere else: the whole crush goes into the qvevri — juice, skins, stems, pips, all of it — the lid goes on, and it stays there for months.

Skins carry colour, tannin and texture. Leave a white grape on its skins through the winter and what you get in spring is not white. It is amber, sometimes closer to copper, with real tannin in it — the same drying grip you get from strong tea. This is what the world now sells as orange wine, and Georgia has been doing it continuously for about eight thousand years.

Western Georgia does it differently. The Imeretian method uses maybe a tenth of the skins and no stems at all, and the wine comes out paler and lighter. The Kakhetian method uses everything. You are in Kakheti, so what lands in your glass is the full version.

What it tastes like, honestly

Dried apricot. Walnut skin. Quince, orange peel, sometimes a mineral edge like wet stone. The finish is dry and slightly astringent rather than fruity, and there is no oak in it because there was never any wood involved.

The first glass often confuses people who came expecting Sancerre. The second one usually does not, and the third arrives with food, which is when it makes sense — this is wine built for a table with cheese, walnut paste, herbs, pickles and grilled meat on it. It is not an aperitif. It is a component of dinner.

Serve it cool but not cold. Fridge-cold flattens it; a cellar in this valley is about the right temperature, which is presumably not a coincidence.

The eight thousand years bit, with the caveat

The claim is real and it is in the archaeological record, not the marketing. In 2017 a team from the University of Toronto and the Georgian National Museum published residue analysis in PNAS showing tartaric acid — the fingerprint of grape wine — in pottery from two Neolithic villages dated to about 6000–5800 BC. That is the oldest evidence of winemaking from the Eurasian grape found anywhere, and it pushed the previous record back by six hundred to a thousand years.

The caveat Kakhetians tend not to volunteer: the two sites, Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora, are in Kvemo Kartli, on the other side of Tbilisi. The pots are Georgian. They are not Kakhetian.

What Kakheti has is the unbroken practice. In 2013 UNESCO added the ancient Georgian traditional qvevri winemaking method to its list of intangible cultural heritage, and the thing being protected was not a vessel but a living body of knowledge — how to build the qvevri, when to open it, how to clean it, what to do with the skins afterwards, and the entire social life that hangs off it.

What to ask for in a cellar

Georgian has a lot of wine vocabulary and four words will get you most of the way.

• Kakhuri or qvevri — ask for the wine made this way, rather than the estate’s European-style bottling. Both are usually available and people will assume you want the second unless you say otherwise.
• Rkatsiteli (რქაწითელი) — the white grape that does most of the work. In qvevri it is the benchmark amber wine.
• Saperavi (საფერავი) — the red. One of very few grapes on earth with red flesh as well as red skin, so it comes out almost opaque, and it ages.
• Mtsvane, Kisi, Khikhvi — the three whites worth trying after Rkatsiteli. Kisi in particular is having a decade. Georgia has around 525 indigenous varieties, so this is the shallow end.

The other useful question is simply what is in the qvevri now. Cellars open them through late spring and summer — the filling happens at rtveli in September — and whatever came up last is what the family is drinking, which is different from whatever is on the price list.

Not everything here is amber

Worth saying, because people arrive thinking all Georgian wine is orange and cloudy.

Kakheti has twenty of Georgia’s thirty-odd protected appellations, and most of them are made in the European way, in steel or oak. Tsinandali is a dry white, Rkatsiteli with some Kakhuri Mtsvane blended in. Mukuzani is dry oak-aged Saperavi. Napareuli is dry Saperavi without the oak. And Kindzmarauli, from the Kvareli district up the valley, is the naturally semi-sweet red that half of Georgia drinks at New Year and that most visitors either love immediately or return to the table untouched.

Prince Alexander Chavchavadze started the European tradition at Tsinandali in the 1830s, twelve kilometres from this house. Both traditions have been running side by side here for two hundred years and nobody local thinks that is a contradiction.

Chacha, since somebody will pour you one

When the qvevri is emptied, what is left at the bottom is the pressed mass of skins and stems. That is also called chacha, and it gets distilled. The result is a clear spirit, usually somewhere between forty and sixty per cent, and it is what appears at the end of a long lunch in a small glass that nobody offered you a choice about.

It is not a digestif in the polite European sense. Treat it with respect and eat something.

How to actually drink this well while you are here

Do not do it in a tasting room with a spittoon and a scorecard. Qvevri wine makes sense at a table, with food, with the person who made it, over about three hours.

That is arrangeable. We are fifteen minutes from a lot of cellars and we know the families in several of them, so tell us what you actually like — light or heavy, amber or red, curious or cautious — and we will point the day at the right ones rather than the ones that pay commission. Usually we mix one polished estate with one family marani, because the contrast is the whole education.

Take cash for the family cellar. Buy the bottle there rather than at the airport. And do not drive.