In Georgia, Wine Forges National Identity—and Deep Pride

Ivan Vdovin/Alamy

Editor's note: This story was reported in the summer of 2024. Recently, Tbilisi has marked by protests against the government, and harsh crackdowns on activists—the history of its wine is just one peephole into the country's political tensions, though far from the complete story. We encourage you to read more for a fuller picture.

“How do you know when it's ready to harvest?” I think aloud, staring at what is, now, just a dusty bunch of grapes.

Third-generation winemaker Bacho Burjanadze holds the fruit up for us, a group of sixteen travelers who just met this morning. “You see this mist?” he says, rubbing a film of natural yeast off the grape’s skin to reveal shiny sea-green flesh below the brown nebula of sugar. Last season’s late hail ruined much of the harvest, but this year has been warm and dry. Burjanadze is optimistic, and the sugar and yeast are good signs.

We are at the Burjanadze winery in Khakheti, Georgia’s most famous wine region located a two-hour drive east of Tbilisi, depending on how hard you take the hairpin turns. The Caucasus mountains loom over the vineyards. We're here during the first rtveli of the season, which is a yearly ritual when workers return home to make wine and feast. There are a number of tours that simulate the harvest experience for visitors, but this one is the real deal: Grapes picked as we go, while learning from Burjanadze, will become wine.

We are handed secateurs and wide-brimmed hats, each of us set to task working along the alleys between vine rows, clipping each bunch of fruit at its base and tossing the juicy grapes into plastic buckets. After an hour we’re sweating under the sun. In the bus on the way over, someone joked how Western it was that we were paying to do this labor, a punchline that continues to rattle around in my head. But before we know it, the feasting hour arrives and we move indoors, just as the light dapples through the windows of the farmhouse.

Burjanadze’s mother lays a low table with breads, cheeses, and shashlik (cubes of grilled meat). Though she doesn’t speak English, she stands over the table proud of her family’s world—the one that we, as tourists, have come to see. With little cups of chacha, a Georgian grappa-like brandy named after the sound made by stomping on grapes, we toast the harvest now bulging in bin bags around us.

“When Georgian soldiers went to war, they would always carry a sapling in their pocket so that if they died, a vine would grow," Burjanadze explains. In the late summer haze, none of us challenge whether this is fact or myth—the telling of it is what matters most. This country has been unfortunate to reside in the overlapping arcs of conquering empires: Russian, Persian, and Ottoman, to name the most recent. Some were religiously opposed to alcohol and were known to have slashed and burned Georgian vines during their time.

Yet amid changing regimes, wine's perseverance has allowed Georgians to maintain a continuous sense of identity, and the pride of being the world’s oldest winemakers. In 2017, fragments of wine jars discovered South of Tbilisi confirmed what Georgians had always known: that their relationship with the elixir has stretched back at least 8,000 years.

We open a 2021 Rkatsiteli, and the natural wine looks cloudy and honey-colored in our glasses. I expect it to be funky from a first whiff, but upon sipping I discover citrus fruits and a delicate structure of tannins; there's an aftertaste like black tea with a slice of lemon. Rkatsiteli is an ancient grape, which is still turned into wine using traditional production methods—a poster child, of sorts, for the storied wines that Georgians take such pride in.

Our afternoon is spent crushing grapes in a wooden hand-cranked machine, though we know that this final burst of effort is just an intermission before more imbibing. Come evening, we return to the long tables, now laid out with Georgian salads of tomato, cucumber, walnuts, and cilantro with bread, and cold entrées like nigvziani badrijani, thin strips of eggplant wrapped around pomegranate and walnut mash to form bite-sized rolls. This is the start of the supra, which literally translates to tablecloth, as tablecloths are used only when guests attend. A supra is not a regular booze-up but a ritualized feast of toasting, communing, and drinking. Burjanadze serves as tamada, the toastmaster, a role that demands eloquence, humor, passion, and a tolerance for the quantities of wine that will be thrown back, as revelers look on with raised glasses.

Round after round, Burjanadze urges us to toast family, ancestors, mother nature, and world peace, as platters of roast pork shashlik and meat dumplings called khinkali are brought out. Bottles of red Saperavi and more Rkatsiteli are endlessly replenished, when Bacho invites us to fuel the toasting ourselves.

“Supra is democratic, we are all equal—make a toast to tell us something about yourselves,” Burjanadze urges. I feel the hot prickle of classroom self-consciousness, and then an American man asks if he can say something. He stands confidently, not tall but large, with a frame that dwarfs the already-small tumbler in his hand. With his gaze downcast, he formulates his toast: “I would just like to remember my buddies from Syria who won’t be coming home,” he says simply.

When we lift our glasses to toast, something has changed. Sixteen people of various nationalities, who met only this morning, let their guard down to take turns rising to their feet to share beliefs, personal stories, and memories of lost loved ones; we articulate our successes and tragedies. This, I realize, is the true intoxication of the supra. And it's my first glimpse of how powerfully wine moves everyone in the country of Georgia.

***

Back in Tbilisi, I meet journalist, democratic and feminist activist, and winemaker Keto Nindze at the cavernous wine bar Vino Underground. Rush-hour honks fill the capital’s narrow streets outside, as we settle onto wooden chairs beneath the low brick roof.

“Everything [in Georgia] symbolizes wine—like the architecture of the medieval century, like churches, even Georgian polyphonic singing, which reminds me of the curly vines,” she says. “Wine is one of the main pillars of our national identity.”

Nindze gives me a condensed version of Georgian wine’s 8000-year history, an epic of “unbroken tradition”—though the thread is worn thin at many points. Georgian wine is traditionally fermented in a qvervri (clay urn), though the process was disparaged as unhygienic by Russian colonists when they invaded in the 19th century. Complaints like this, which derided Georgia’s traditional winemaking practices, reappear throughout their fraught relationship. As an activist, Nindze protests the ongoing Russian occupation of Georgia territory and influence in domestic politics: and she is especially vocal about the so-called “Russian Law” against foreign agents, at the core of recent protests in the streets of Tbilisi. But as I learn, politics often refracts through wine in Georgia.

After World War I, there was a shining moment when Georgians had a democratic republic, Nindze says, but in 1921 the Bolsheviks invaded, and Georgia became a Soviet Socialist Republic. Farms were collectivized, and agriculture was managed according to modern industrial methods that maximized output. The quality of Georgian wine declined, but more tragic and lasting was the impact of Soviet policy on grape diversity. “You know that we have more than 500 indigenous varieties, right?” Keto asks, somewhat rhetorically.

Keto Nindze

Leadership in Moscow decided that the new Georgia Soviet Socialist Republic would become the USSR’s primary wine producer. Of the 525 grape varieties catalogued throughout Georgia before this policy, Soviet administrators earmarked the 40 most resilient and productive varieties (a number that included those to be used as table grapes). This led to the clearing of millennia of accumulated biodiversity, in the effort to make room for selected varietals. Winemaking factories employing modern industrial methods were built, and output quotas were assigned.

Some good wines were made for the Soviet elite, but most available in shops was notoriously bad, and watered down with added sugar. Soviet wine became a punchline for Georgians. At Wine Boutique, a bohemian Tbilisi wine shop, I wanted to try some of it for myself (in the name of research, naturally); my request caused owner Giorgi to storm over and, with a glint of irony, demand, “Why the fuck do you want to drink Soviet wine?” (Things were smoothed over with a few chachas.)

One light spot in the Soviet era was that Georgians were allowed to retain small personal plots for growing grapes, on the condition that neither the grapes nor wine could be sold. In this way, a broader swath of Georgian grapes managed to survive.

After the Soviet collapse in 1991, Georgia continued to export the same wines to Russia until tensions exploded into the the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, a 16-day invasion of Georgia, that resulted in Russia banning Georgian wine exports.

It was a blessing in disguise. “We always give a toast for [Russia's chief sanitary officer] Gennady Onishchenko who banned Georgian wines because this was the crucial turning point.” Without guaranteed Russian exports, Georgia had to compete in the international market with no nostalgia for Soviet semi-sweets or semi-dries.

I ask Keto why she chose this bar for us to meet. “Vino Underground was the first natural wine bar in Tbilisi,” she says proudly. It was here that “this movement was formed, [here that] Georgians were taught making wine in a qvervri was something worthy.”

***

My next wine-tasting stop is the town of Gori. Though better known as the birthplace of Stalin than it is for wine, there is a community of winemakers here dedicated to reviving forgotten varietals.

“I’m not a professional winemaker—it’s more a lifestyle and passion,” says Tengo Dvalishvil, when we meet in his home cellar. He's being modest: his wines are for sale under the label TD Winery, and he takes bookings for tastings. Dvalishvil has the lithe physique of a dancer, as his other job is teaching traditional folk dance at the school in his village. The cellar walls are lined with demijohns, while at our feet yawn the mouths of three qvevris, their bodies sunk deep into the earth beneath the concrete foundation.

Dvalishvil has cultivated three varieties including Danakharuli, a grape that once thrived in this region. Danakharuli is a traveler: when oligarch and former Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili wanted to create a nursery in 2007 to collect and protect forgotten grapes, nursery employees rediscovered Danakharuli not in Georgia but in a garden in Moldova, a distant corner of the former USSR. Now, these precious orbs sit in row after labeled row of grapes that have been meticulously catalogued, to collectively represent all 437 varieties currently found across Georgia’s 10 wine regions.

When Dvalishvil planted Danakharuli, he had no idea what it would taste like, or even how to cultivate it. After a few years of experimentation, he bottled his first Danakharuli wine in 2020. “I brought history back to my village,” he says. An expert who tried it was blown away, Dvalishvil isn't too shy to admit, thanks to a taste that is simultaneously rich and light.

Sitting in Dvalishvil's dining room, I am invited to sample Danakharuli. Initially, I am disappointed at this dry red. The palette is muted. But, then, it opens up and releases its bouquet; there's an elegant structure of berries. It's a piece of history, but Dvalishvil warns me that natural wines are not time capsules. “Natural wines are like us—they have a different mood every day. Like this wine—tomorrow it will be completely different.”

There is a philosophical difference in how Dvalishvil and his father, Gogi, approach winemaking. After lunch, Gogi, who is wearing a too-small North Face baseball cap, sits in the garden beside a grandson playing on his phone. Gogi spent half his life in the Soviet Union, which left an indelible mark. He remembers having to burn his missing Grandfather’s letters sent during the war so the KGB wouldn't find them; he also remembers terrible Soviet wine. Instead of a qvervri they used what Gogi derisively calls “swimming pools,” which were steel tanks that, to Gogi, are at once less hygienic than qvervris and also representative of the mass, soulless wine production of the era. More than once a worker got drunk, fell in, and had to be fished out of these vats, he tells me.

“Between us was a philosophic problem,” says Tengo of their father-son dynamic, which led them to divide the wine cellar down the middle. Gogi makes what his son calls “classical wines,” an approach that contrasts natural methods by using sulfites and imported “cultural yeast." For Gogi, though, this was simply a means of dealing with Soviet scarcity. With little money and food to buy, Gogi needed to be self-reliant—classical methods guaranteed a harvest.

Natural wines, though, are at once trendy and rooted in pre-Soviet Georgian tradition. “Last year I almost lost 4000 kilograms [of] grapes," says the younger Dvalishvil. “For me it was a big loss. Some people used pesticides, and they took a harvest but I’m never going to.”

It's harvest season, and there is a lot more work to do before the sun sets. I’d rather not outstay my welcome. As we wave goodbye, Gogi's parting words are gathered into a distinctly Georgian turn of phrase—one that I can hear echoing through various generations: “The sun warms the body and wine warms the soul.”

Get a taste of Georgian wine for yourself

Book a flight into Tbilisi, where a range of tours and wineries welcome visitors.

• Eat This! Tours: A boutique agency focused on food and wine experiences throughout Georgia, including the Rtveli tour the writer took. They tend to be one step ahead of the larger tour companies.

• Wine Boutique: The Tbilisi wine bar famous for a giant table around which robust wines complement equally hearty philosophical conversations. Try the Dzelshavi.

• Vino Underground: The home of Georgian natural wine with an appropriately excellent selection. If they have it in stock, try the 2022 Kapistoni Mukhamtsvane.

• Baia’s Winery: An excellent homestay at a Kutaisi winery, where the food, accommodation, and people don't disappoint. Baia herself can show you around.

• TD Winery at Gogi Dvalishvili Family Wine Cellar: Meet Tengo, where rooms are available to book and Georgia's forgotten varieties can be sampled.

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler